Fire Red Cherry 10 gallon

The shrimp came in today! I got exactly 10 young adult fire red cherries from Freshwater Aquarium Shrimp - TheShrimpFarm.com. I got the 2-3 day priority shipping as oppose to 1 day, and all still arrived alive and were perfectly healthy. They were packaged carefully in a breather bag, surrounded by Styrofoam and insulation plus a heat pack. I had to leave work in the middle of the day to go retrieve them from my front porch because it was 26 degrees F outside today. I got to them about 30 minutes after they were delivered.

I'm very happy with the shrimp i received. I got a good mix of males and females, i think mostly females which is nice because I want them to breed as much as possible. All of them were solid red, even the males. Some were darker shades than others, but all very appealing and nice to look at. Would definitely recommend! I drip acclimated them for about 40 minutes (my parameters were already pretty much the same as the water they came from) and they seem very happy now, about 4 hours later. All are scurrying around foraging and displaying themselves very well Can't wait for them to breed and get a colony going!

Zoidburg said:

I would personally bump up the GH to 6, at least.


I'm not sure if I would order from the Shrimp Farm, either... not to say that they are a bad place or anything... just, the majority of people I know who sell shrimp, if you order 10 from them, you are going to actually get 11 or 12 shrimp, not 10. They send extra in case of loss during transit... that aside, the shrimp look great! And it appears you got a berried female, too! (which might be dropping her eggs?)


I think you'll do great, now that you know what the previous issue was! Looking forward to more updates!

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I did bump the GH up to about 8. The water the shrimp came in was about 7 or 8 and so I figured it was best to match conditions. Seems to be paying off. I looked in the tank this morning and everyone seemed happy still.

I am aware that usually you should get at least one extra one, and i had kind of hoped for that. I'm not upset though because all 10 shrimp were big, healthy and top notch quality. Couldn't really have asked for more than that. It was my first time ever getting something live through the mail, and I chose them because they had 5 star reviews across the board and their shipping cost was reasonable. All said and done i'm perfectly happy with the result.

I was looking for berried females last night and couldn't really tell if any were because their shells are all so dark. Hopefully at least one is berried! that would be fantastic. If not then I know I have a lot of females that are ready to breed and at least a couple of males, so hopefully will be seeing some babies soon.

Tank has been set up for a little over a month now, there's been some ups and downs along the way but its all been a good learning experience.

At first I thought i had a mix of males and females, turns out that wasn't the case. I had all females, so breeding was out of the question. I ended up complaining to the shrimp farm that I didn't get a mix of sexes, so i convinced them to send me some males at a discount + shipping. A little over a week ago is when i got the males, and as of today i already have a berried female! Very excited to have some babies, and hopefully some more of my females will become berried sooner or later. That is the good news that has come after some tough lessons.

One of the best/hardest lessons i've learned by ordering shrimp online is that these guys are very sensitive, despite being labeled as the hardiest dwarf shrimp in the hobby. After my last post i ended up losing all but 5 of my female shrimp. I think this was mostly a result of failing to molt. To combat this i upped my remineralized water to 10dGH and 5dKH and fed the shrimp blanched Kale. Since i've started doing this everything has been very stable with the females.

The males coming in the mail last week was a similar experience, minus the molting issues. I recieved 10 shrimp, 2 were DOA (did get refunded for these thankfully) and I lost another 2 in the acclimation process. So now i'm at a steady 11 shrimp with almost a 1 to 1 male female ratio, which i can deal with happily. I am curious to know if anyone else that has ordered shrimp online has experienced a similar trend, and that is after acclimation that there is a bit of a die-off before the rest of the shrimp stabilize. It makes sense that this would happen, what with them going through shipping and the stress of acclimation, fluctuating temperatures, and my tank probably wasn't very well cycled at the beginning honestly.. impatience gets the best of me.