Lowest temperature for shrimps?

Chinadog

Chinadog

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I like the idea of getting some shrimps as scavengers but know next to nothing about them. I went to my usual aquarium/reptile shop to have a look and maybe buy some but i was told that none of them could tolerate cold water, in fact the guy looked at me like i had just asked the dumbest question ever! Anyway when i got home i looked up some care sheets for the ones they had in the shop (Cherry, Bamboo and Japonica shrimps) and it does seem like mid to low 60's is their lower limit. I was wanting to keep them with my C. pyrrhgaster who's tank will most likely fall to the mid 50's over the winter so would this kill them? It seems very popular to keep shrimps and newts together so what do people do over the colder months? Thanks in advance for any help :)
 
A while ago I asked a similair question on ThePlantedTank forum and they said that the shrimp will do just fine at those temps, granted they will be much less active and probebly won't really reproduce.
 
Thanks for the reply, i think i'll get a couple now and see what happens, i did think it was strange how many people kept them with newts if they were tropical!
 
During this winter's very cold weather, we had a big power outage with an ice storm, and then the rads stopped working. My tanks got VERY cold. Turns out my brand new thermometers were both broken right at the clamp that held them to the scale and I didn't realize how cold things were until it was a bit too late for some of my fish. But my shrimp did fine.

I had cherries, Amanos and Bamboos, and they all survived temperatures from 50-55 F for what must have been two or three weeks. I now have heaters in the tanks, set so they won't go below 70F, but the shrimp did not appear unduly stressed by the chill. It does slow them down & they eat less. I could not say if it affected breeding, but I would expect that it would also slow or stop reproduction until the temperatures go up.

I regularly keep their tanks around 70 - 72 F, as much as possible. They can manage higher temperatures, but I keep a lot of cool water fish as well, so they all get on best at these temps. Main thing is making sure the water is very clean. They are very intolerant of dirty water, high nitrates and super sensitive to nitrites and ammonia, as well as some metals, like copper.
 
freshwater shrimps in the Neocaridina and Paratya (neocardina includes red cherries, sakuras...) and Caridina(yamatos) are actually coldwater species and tend to die from heat waves... they are most comfortable around 18-22, which is ideal for most aquatic caudates.

Shrimps(restricted to the small species listed above) are just the ideal tank mates for newts imo.
 
I must add that, the bee shrimps or Caridina cantonensis spp. (Cristal Red Shrimp, King kong, etc) favor lightly acidic water while the cherry shrimps or the Neocaridina davidi variants (Cherries, Sakuras, Blue Velvet, yellows, etc....) tolerate a higher ph up to 8.0.

The Yamato shrimps or the Caridina multidentata (AKA Amano shrimps) tend to grow larger than the Neocaridina Davidi and can only breed in brackish water.


Naturally, the Neocaridina Davidi variants are the ones you want for your caudate aquaria.

There is a huge range of colors to choose from(transparent wild type, red, yellow, blue, etc..), so try to have it match the color of your setup. They will also work as clean-up crew and add a safe diversity in the tank. With some shrimp-only shelters (sold by many online shops), you can have them breed while some get picked off by a diligent newt or axolotl.

Just make sure to put only a single color in the aquarium, because mix of two different colors will almost always end up in the wild type.
 
I've done a lot of research myself about shrimp and cold temperatures just to ensure they would be fine with my newts. Dwarf shrimp are certainly the best for colder waters. If you were looking to breed them, you would need waters at a constant 65-75 degrees F. They would probably also need to be in a species only tank because they may get stressed or fearful due to larger animals. However, they will survive temps as low as 50 degrees F. This is a general reference to shrimps such as Neocaridina Heteropoda, Palaemonetes sp, and Caridina multidentata. That would be cherries, ghost, and amano shrimp.
The colder it gets, the slower the metabolism, so overall the less they will eat. At 50 degrees they would still do a pretty good job as a clean up crew. As far as algae eating goes, it would go in order of best to worse, amano, cherry, ghost. Amano are fantastic algae eaters but they have a complex life cycle and unless you were to include brackish water you wouldn't have any hope of seeing young in the tank. Cherries and ghost shrimp will both reproduce and rear their young in freshwater. Of the three shrimp, ghosts tend to be the most aggressive. I've handled both amanos and cherry but I'm considering going ghosts because of how cheap they are in comparison to cherries and amano.
 
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