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Greetings, and welcome to Shrimp Basics Lesson 8!
Hopefully, your shrimp aren’t as big of airheads as Shrimply, but if they are, remember that they’re lying to you – they almost certainly do not need food. They’re like cats rushing over anytime you touch a can of tuna even if they just got fed. In many cases, a healthy ecosystem produces enough algae and biofilm to support a moderately sized shrimp population without any supplemental feeding.
In fact, feeding often causes more harm than good. Overfeeding is one of the most common mistakes that new shrimp keepers make. Shrimp do not eat very much so it’s easy to add excess, leading to poor water quality that stresses out our shrimp.
That being said, additional food can diversify their diet to encourage growth and breeding when done properly. Doing so is necessary if you really want to breed a lot of shrimp (10+ shrimp per gallon) because a small tank cannot produce enough food naturally to support an unnatural population. Feeding frenzies are also a lot of fun to watch. Whenever you are supplementing your shrimps’ diet with additional food, here are three Feeding Rules of Thumb to feed your shrimp safely:
One of the biggest mistakes that kills shrimp is overfeeding and we can avoid this issue by feeding cautiously. When you first get shrimp, you don’t even need to feed them for the first week or two, assuming your tank has matured for 4-6 weeks. When you do finally add food, start with a VERY small amount and see how long it takes for your shrimp to devour it. If it lasts longer than the recommended timeframe of Rule 2, then you don’t need to feed that much. Shrimp are very unlikely to starve if they’re added to a tank that has been cycled and left to mature for the recommended time discussed in previous Shrimp School lessons. We can always feed more but leftovers can be difficult to remove. A feeding dish is a great way to remove uneaten food but lighter or more soluble foods may not stay in the dish.
To put things in perspective for you, researchers estimate that shrimp eat 4% of their body weight in food per day. When you first order shrimp, they tend to be around 2-3 months old and weigh 60-90 mg, meaning 10 shrimp need around 18 mg of food per day in total. That’s equal to a very small pinch of food!
Researchers only need to feed this amount because they keep shrimp in empty glass boxes without any biofilm. Our goal at Shrimply Explained is to help you build an ecosystem that works for you. When we account for the amount of food available in a healthy hobbyist tank, you may only need to feed once a week (if at all) for a small population of shrimp.
That being said, shrimp don’t stay the same size forever. Hopefully, they also start breeding in your tank until they engulf the tank (and your life), making it very difficult to count how many there are. What’s 4% of a writhing mass of shrimp??
As they grow and breed, keep increasing the food quantity or feeding frequency by a small amount every month or so. If you want the population to stop growing, then limit or reduce feeding.
| Category | Examples | TTR |
|---|---|---|
| Powdered Foods | BacterAE | Difficult to remove – feed extremely cautiously |
| Small Granules (<3 mm) or Sugary Food | Banana, Xtreme Nano Pellets | 1-2 hours |
| Large Granules (3+ mm) or Semi-Soluble Food | Shrimp Envy Pellets, green beans | 2-3 hours |
| Insoluble Food | Snowflake (soy bean hulls), carrots | *12 hours |
*While manufacturers often state that leftovers of foods like Snowflake never need to be removed, they do eventually impact water quality so we recommend removing them after 12 hours for the sake of caution.
Leftover food may not cause an immediate problem in the tank but it acts like a ticking time bomb. Bacteria break it down over time and, in doing so, use up carbonate and drop the tank’s KH (carbonate hardness). Once KH is low enough, large pH swings can occur from maintenance or additional decomposition that may harm your shrimp.
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As you can see, proper and safe feeding is incredibly important for a successful shrimp tank. No matter what you feed, these three rules of thumb set you up for success on your shrimp keeping journey. Check out SB108 to learn how to differentiate male and female shrimp to make sure you have both sexes in the tank so they can breed. We also cover fascinating evolutionary reasons why male and female shrimp look the way they do!
