[wetworks]

I feed my Bamboo Shrimps with Spectrum Small Fish Formula and Hikari algae wafers. I grind them up in a mortar and pestle and drop into the water in front of my power filters spillway. One of them is about a year old, and the other is about four months, and they both have molted multiple times. They never sift my substrate or scrape my plants, which I think means they are getting enough to eat. I only have two in the tank, so there is enough organic matter in the water column to support them if I supplement their diet with the powdered foods placed into the filter spillway.

Regarding the color, both of mine look drastically different from each other. I have read (but do not know if it is true) that these shrimps are very difficult to breed in captivity, so the specimens that are available in your LFS are almost all (if not all) going to be wild caught. Because of this you do not see the consistency of coloring that you do in CRS, RCS, Tiger Shrimps, etc. Also, I have noticed that the three most common species of filter shrimps are often mislabeled for each other, which probably makes an image search on the internet even more confusing. These shrimps also change color over a surprising range of shades (more than other shrimps I have kept, anyway), though I have not been able to locate any reliable data as to why they do this.

 

[wetworks]

I didn't want to keep yet another type of fish food around, so I wound up pulverizing sinking pellets and flake food then mixing that with with to feed my bamboo shrimp. They did very well and grew substantially. One of them never did anything except filter, the other never did anything but pick at the substrate, so I'm a bit dubious about the idea that these shrimp are necessarily hungry if they are picking.

They stayed a fairly nice light brown for the year or so that I had them. Once they turned even slightly orange, they were goners within a week.

I don't suppose your blue bamboo shrimp could actually be a vampire shrimp?

jasonpatterson has a good point; I have not seen many vampire shrimps in person, but I have seen a bunch of photos and they are often a bluish coloration. They get quite a bit larger than bamboo shrimps though. Also, they are not anywhere near as common in the hobby as the bamboo shrimps, at least here in Florida. Any chance you could put up some pics?