Shrimp, crayfish and snails for your aquarium

Small, busy dwarf shrimp tirelessly pick their way through the aquarium, constantly moving their claws in search of tasty food and fine algae growth to graze on. Red, yellow, blue or striped crawlers add dots of color like little bright stars. A rather leisurely nerite snail with a yellow and black striped shell creeps across the aquarium glass and does its job there: grazing on algae while keeping the glass clean. Invertebrates – that is, the commonly kept dwarf shrimp, crayfish and snails – are now very popular in the aquarium hobby, and no longer just among specialists. They enrich any kind of aquarium. Not only are they interesting to watch, they also take on important tasks in the aquarium's biological system and ensure a more stable ecosystem. Crayfish, shrimp and snails are decomposers by nature, i.e. excellent recyclers of leftovers. This allows them to reduce algae and mulm. In particular, snails that eat algae growth, such as nerite snails and horned nerite snails, and shrimp are popular as a cleaning crew in aquascaping aquariums – the Amano shrimp deserves special mention here, as besides algae growth it also likes to eat fully grown filamentous algae, for example. Especially in nano aquariums, tanks designed specifically for keeping colorful dwarf shrimp of the genera Caridina and Neocaridina are also very popular. These aquariums can be planted very well, since neither shrimp nor the algae-eating nerite snails and horned nerite snails nibble on plants.

In this section of the Aquascaping Wiki we give you plenty of helpful tips and advice on keeping invertebrates such as shrimp, snails and crayfish properly. How should a shrimp aquarium be equipped? How do you feed shrimp and other invertebrates properly and in a species-appropriate way? Which shrimp species are well suited to a planted aquarium? We answer these and many other questions here in the "Invertebrates" section.