Cherry Shrimp

The cherry shrimp (Neocaridina davidi) is the shrimp most people start with, and for good reason. It is small, peaceful, endlessly colorful, and one of the easiest invertebrates to keep alive and breeding. The wild form from Taiwan and eastern China is a drab mottled brown, but decades of selective breeding have produced red, orange, yellow, green, blue, black, and striped "rili" lines. The familiar bright-red morph is what gave the species its common name. Females reach about 4 cm and carry the strongest color, while males stay a little smaller and more see-through.

As a clean-up crew they graze all day on algae, biofilm, and leftover food, grabbing particles with tiny claw-tipped legs, and they will not touch healthy plants. Care is genuinely beginner-level: a planted nano tank of 8 litres or more works, and they happily live at 16-28 °C, often with no heater at all. The one thing to get right is minerals for molting. Keep the pH around 6.5-8.5 with a moderate GH and KH, and add crushed coral or a mineral supplement if your water is soft, or the shrimp will struggle to build a new shell after each molt. A sponge filter stops babies from being sucked in.

Unlike filter feeders such as the bamboo shrimp, cherry shrimp have no larval stage, so they breed readily in an ordinary freshwater tank. A berried female fans 20 to 30 eggs under her tail for two to three weeks, and they hatch as fully formed miniature shrimp that begin grazing at once. Give a small group a stable, mature tank and a colony will build on its own.