How to acclimatise your new shrimp

Your shrimp have just travelled express, in the dark, in a sealed bag. The trip itself is rarely the problem — the risky part is the hour after you open the box. Here is exactly what to do, in order.

Have the tank ready before delivery day

Acclimatisation goes well or badly long before the courier knocks.

• The tank should be fully cycled (cycling is growing the tank's helpful waste-processing bacteria) — zero ammonia, zero nitrite, the two toxic waste chemicals every new tank produces — and running for at least a few weeks. Shrimp are considerably less forgiving of an unfinished cycle than most community fish.
• Your water should already suit the species. Our Neocaridina are raised in remineralised tap water (tap water with shrimp minerals added) at around TDS 160 — TDS is total dissolved solids, everything dissolved in the water — so most established community tanks suit them straight away. Caridina lines — including the Taiwan Bee lines — want soft, buffered water: an active substrate (a soil that deliberately holds pH low) plus remineralised RO (purified reverse-osmosis water with minerals added back).
• Be home on the day. Livestock cannot sit on a doorstep, and our Live Arrival Guarantee depends on the parcel being received in person.

One thing not to do: adjust your parameters on the day the shrimp land. A tank being adjusted is a tank that is moving, and movement is the one thing shrimp handle badly.

The first ten minutes

1. Open the box straight away, indoors, away from heaters, direct sun and the air-conditioning vent.
2. Look before you do anything else. Pale, still shrimp are normal after transit — they usually colour up within the hour. It is not a reliable sign that anything has gone wrong.
3. If something clearly has gone wrong, document it now, while the bags are still sealed. Clear photos plus a short video of the unopened bag, emailed to us within 8 hours of delivery, is all a claim needs. That window is not there to catch anyone out — a sealed bag is simply the only honest record of how the animals arrived, and it lets us sort things out the same day. The full steps are on our DOA & Missing Items Policy page.
4. Turn the tank light off, or right down, and leave it off for the rest of the day.

Drip acclimatisation, step by step

1. Float the sealed bag in the tank for 10–15 minutes so the temperatures meet.
2. Tip the bag out — shrimp and shipping water together — into a clean container that has never met soap, detergent or any other chemical. A takeaway tub or small bucket kept only for aquarium jobs is ideal.
3. Start a siphon with a length of airline tubing running from the tank down to the container. Tie a loose knot in the tubing, or fit a small valve, and slow the flow to 2–3 drips per second.
4. Let it run until the volume in the container has at least doubled — roughly 45–60 minutes. Taking longer does no harm at all.
5. Net the shrimp across into the tank, gently. Do not pour the shipping water in — tip it down the sink.

Acclimatising more than one bag? Run each in its own container. Combining them is the quickest way to lose track of which group came from where if you later need to ask us about one of them.

The first 48 hours

• Do not feed for the first 24 hours. There is far more biofilm (the thin film of microbes shrimp graze on) in an established tank than a handful of juveniles can get through, and uneaten food is the last thing a settling tank needs.
• Keep the light off on day one, then go back to your normal schedule on day two.
• Expect hiding. New shrimp often vanish into the moss and hardscape (rocks and wood) for a day. Colour returning, and shrimp grazing out in the open, is the sign things are on track.
• Resist the urge to fiddle. No water change, no dosing, no rescaping for the first few days.
• Something looks off? Message us the same day with a photo or a short video. We would far rather look at it early than after the fact.

The mistakes we see most

• Temperature-only acclimatisation. Floating the bag for fifteen minutes and tipping it in matches the temperature and nothing else. It is fine for a fish; it is the classic way to lose shrimp.
• Dripping too fast. A steady trickle is not a drip. If you cannot count the drops, it is too quick.
• Adding the shipping water. It has been holding livestock in a sealed bag for a day or more. It does not belong in your tank.
• Feeding on arrival as a welcome gesture — it only fouls the water at the moment the shrimp are least able to cope.
• Adding shrimp to a tank that is still cycling, or one whose parameters were adjusted that morning.
• Acclimatising under a bright light, which piles on stress at exactly the wrong time.

After the first week

Once they are grazing, the routine is deliberately dull: small weekly water changes of 10–15% with temperature-matched, remineralised water, sparing feeding every day or two with anything untouched removed after a few hours, and no sudden changes to anything. Stability beats perfection — a steady tank sitting slightly off the textbook numbers will out-perform a “perfect” one that swings.

Our full Shrimp Care & Acclimation Guide covers the same ground alongside the tank-setup detail. If you are still deciding where to start, the Neocaridina range is the most forgiving place to do it. And if you are stuck on your numbers, email us your GH, KH (carbonate hardness) and TDS and we will give you a straight answer for your setup.