Acidic water is best a ph of 6.5 and about 3 or 4 degrees of KH. A lot of people who breed them use ADA aquasoil Amazonia as it acidifies the water (the soil produces ammonia for a few weeks so it needs to be very cycled), it may also have lots of nutrients that help the micro food grow. A temp of anything up to 24C. I keep them at 21/22C, the consensus seems to be 20% per week water change I have done bigger and smaller ones depending on how many shrimp were in the tank. I don’t feed them anything special, gold fish flakes, algae wafers, spinach, nettles, peas, sometimes some frozen mussel, seeds, oats anything they seem to like. With five shrimp in 29 gallons they probably wont be interested in any food you give them as they would eat what grows in the tank, remove any uneaten processed food after an hour, I usually leave any veg or seeds in for 24 hours as it wont pollute the water. When they are happy they breed fast. I have C grades with a few A grades and maybe one or two S grade. The SS may be more sensitive due to the amount of selective breeding. Yeah cover the inlet with a sponge, any good filter is fine, I use two on my small tank so that I can rotate cleaning and not deplete the bacteria at each clean.
Any plants are fine, some people say that crypts and anubias can cause problems because of the ‘oxilates’ that they release when melting or being cut. Moss is good for the babies as they can hide and feel safe, they depend on the micro food in the tank and don’t really eat any food I put in until they are a couple of weeks old. I feed some ground flakes if there are a lot of babies in the tank. If you want to add new plants you need to be careful, I let any new plants grow in the fish tank for a few weeks just to make sure that there are no poisons left on them. As Corin said there seems to be lots of opinions on ferts and if they are bad for the shrimp or not haven’t come across any data that convinces me either way. I have them in low light with mostly slow growing plants and don’t add any plant ferts. Dried oak leaves or Indian Almond leaves are good for them also.
Hope all goes well with them.
