rm
Passport
- Family
- Shrimp and Yabbies
- Grows to
- 15 cm (5.9")
- Lives
- 5+ years
- Temperament
- Peaceful
- Care
- Intermediate
- SwimsSuggested
- Mid-water
- Keep
- One is fine
- Water
- 22–28 °C (72–82 °F)
SenegalDemocratic Republic of the Congo
Care requirements
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On record for Vampire Shrimp: adult size, lifespan, minimum tank, temperature, ph, hardness, carbonate hardness, minimum group, diet, care level, swim level.
Not on record for Vampire Shrimp: tank length.
A figure that is not on record is left out rather than guessed. One marked Suggested comes from keeping knowledge rather than a page.
- Minimum tank 57 L / 15.0 US gal
- pH 6–8
- Hardness 6–20 dGH
- Carbonate hardness 2–15 dKH
- Diet detritivore /omnivore
Care notes written from general aquarium knowledge, not from the cited sources.
About
Vampire shrimp are the largest filter feeder most people will keep, and the name is nonsense — they're gentle, harmless animals with fans instead of claws, named for a look rather than a habit.
A good one is genuinely beautiful. The body is heavy and sculpted, and the colour runs from pale grey through fawn to a deep, chalky blue that can be spectacular under the right light. They change shade over days rather than hours.
They're also shy and largely nocturnal, which is the honest catch. A vampire shrimp in a busy, brightly lit tank spends most of its life wedged under wood, and people who bought one for the display see it rarely.
Tank setup
Give your vampire shrimp a cave and a current, and put them next to each other. They want somewhere dark to sit with their fans out in moving water, and if the tank provides only one of those two things you'll never see the animal feed.
Build the hide from wood or rock with an opening facing the flow. That's the whole design problem for this species, and getting it right transforms how much of the shrimp you see.
Keep the light subdued or heavily shaded by floating plants. They'll come out far more readily in a dim tank.
They need a mature, stable tank. This is a long-lived animal that does badly in anything new or fluctuating.
Feeding
Vampire shrimp filter their food out of the water, and a clean tank contains almost none. Starvation is the commonest way they die and it takes months, so the keeper rarely connects the death to the cause.
Feed the water directly. Powdered foods, spirulina, crushed flake and infusoria-grade products, squirted into the current upstream of the hide, are what reach them.
Feed after the lights go out. They're most active then, and food dropped in during the day is usually eaten by everything else first.
Avoid: copper in any form, and avoid relying on whatever the fish leave behind. It does not reach a filter feeder.
Filtration and flow
Give them decent flow past the perch. They came from fast water and their whole feeding method depends on the current doing the work.
Filter well for waste but accept that you're removing their food, so column feeding is not optional.
Guard the intake. Those fans are fine structures and they damage easily.
With plants
Vampire shrimp are completely safe with plants and physically incapable of harming them.
Plant around the hide rather than over it. Floating plants are the useful addition because the shade brings a shy animal out.
Moss and dense growth near the flow will catch particles and add to what drifts past them.
Health
Moult failure is the main risk and hardness is the usual reason. A shrimp this large needs a serious mineral supply to build a new shell, and very soft water is a slow death sentence.
Starvation is the other and it's insidious. Look at the abdomen — a well-fed vampire shrimp is solid and opaque, a starving one goes thin and translucent from the tail forward.
They're intolerant of copper, of sudden changes and of rough acclimatisation. Take hours over introducing them.
Breeding
This will not happen in a freshwater tank. The larvae need brackish water to develop and then a return to fresh water to mature, and the full cycle has rarely been reproduced outside a commercial hatchery.
Berried females turn up in home tanks and the larvae die within days. It isn't something you've done wrong.
They're wild-caught from West Africa in consequence, and they can live a very long time — well over a decade in a tank that suits them. That longevity is the argument for setting the tank up properly before you buy one rather than after.
Tank mates
Avoid14
- Convict Cichlid Convict Cichlid reaches 15 cm and will eat adult Vampire Shrimp.
- Jewel Cichlid Jewel Cichlid reaches 15 cm and will eat adult Vampire Shrimp.
- Kribensis Kribensis reaches 8 cm and will eat adult Vampire Shrimp.
- Oscar Oscar reaches 35 cm and will eat adult Vampire Shrimp.
- Panda Garra Panda Garra reaches 9 cm and will eat adult Vampire Shrimp.
Only with care33
- Chinese Algae Eater Chinese Algae Eater is aggressive and Vampire Shrimp is peaceful.
- Least Killifish Least Killifish is small enough to leave adult Vampire Shrimp alone, but will still take shrimplets.
- Scarlet Badis Scarlet Badis is small enough to leave adult Vampire Shrimp alone, but will still take shrimplets.
- Agassiz's Dwarf Cichlid Agassiz's Dwarf Cichlid is a risk to Vampire Shrimp: shrimp and yabbies and sth american cichlids - dwarf are a pairing to watch.
- Angelfish Angelfish is a risk to Vampire Shrimp: angelfish and shrimp and yabbies are a pairing to watch.
No conflict is recorded with the other 61 species in the database, so nothing to flag.