I've kept Bamboo shrimp for some time now. I've yet to succeed at breeding any, because after they mature, if you get any eggbearing females, you need a brackish water tank to have any chance of raising the babies, and it takes about 90 days before they morph into shrimplets. Something I'd like to try one day, though.
But I find they do need a pretty decent current to do really well. They prefer to feed with their fans, though they can pick food off the bottom if they don't get enough from the water column. If I see mine doing this, I feed them more, as I think it's quite hard on them to forage on the bottom, far more effort for less edible food than by filtering.
I keep a secondary circulation pump running in their tank always, so I can turn the filter off when I feed them. I feed them cultured green water, Golden Pearls in the 5-50 micron size, powdered spirulina mixed in water, spray dried algae or crustaceans also, mixed in water first. Those last two are made by Two Little Fishies, for marine filter feeders but it works for fresh water too. Can also feed them anything else you'd feed to marine filter feeders, like liquid phyto.
I feed them 2 or 3 times a week, giving them about 100 cc of dense green water, or a half cup of dried products mixed well in water. Baker's yeast, allowed to dissolve in water for about fifteen minutes with a pinch of sugar and mixed well also works as an occasional feed. I wouldn't use it all the time.
I turn the filter off for at least an hour or a bit more when I feed them, to allow them time to sieve the goodies out before the filter would take them out. The pump keeps it all going around. I keep chunks of wood, or big rocks in places where they can hang on and sit in the current, and for a long time I had an old used filter sponge hanging on the tank side that they really liked to cling to. It had a hole in the middle as it was from from a flat type of sponge filter, so they would sit in the hole too. It eventually became too waterlogged for the suction cup to hold in place, so I took it out. They'll also use plants to hang onto, but appear to prefer solid objects that don't move as much. They don't swim very often, but if they do, they look something like a log with legs. Clumsy and kind of funny. Very, very peaceful, never bother anything else, and the worst they can do is poke something with a closed fan, which does not seem to do any damage to anything, the rare time I've seen one do this.
Dominant males often turn a brick red colour when mature, and males also grow a big hook behind their 'elbows', for lack of the proper term for the joint. First pair of walking legs grows the hook. All males have a thicker, heavier pair of first walking legs, female's legs are all the same size. Same is true of the Vampire shrimp, Atya gabonensis. The differences become more pronounced with age, but even at 1 3/4", you can see the difference. Only really accurate way to sex them before they are mature. I don't think they care much about sex ratio in terms of living together, but I try to keep about 2 - 3 females to one male. They are living in a 29G tank at present, with fish, other shrimp and snails.
