[hywaydave]

I have quite a few red cherry shrimp in my 45 gallon community fish tank for about 2 years now. Last week while purchasing some harlequin rasboras at the LFS they accidentally scooped up 3 large ghost shrimp (also called glass shrimp). They are probably about one inch long and they said that they co-exist peacefully with red cherry shrimp even through RC shrimp are half the size. After letting them loose in my tank, I started reading on the Internet and have read good and bad about mixing the two. However, some people have called certain crayfish "ghost shrimp" so I may not be reading the correct information.

One of the ghost shrimp is carrying eggs under her tail so I will soon have more ghost shrimp. I don't want to destroy my planted tank trying to catch them if I don't have to. So far I haven't noticed the ghost shrimp harrassing the RC shrimp.

Should I be concerned or will the two get along just fine? I should have asked this before I dumped them in the tank.

 

[thekoimaiden]

If you have an established population of RCS you shouldn't have any issues. Ghost shrimp will sometimes pick them off, but with a healthy breeding population of RCS that's not always a bad thing. Man, those guys can overpopulate!!

As to the eggs, those don't always mean you will get more ghost shrimp. They don't have the same easy breeding cycle as the RCS. Free-swimming, filter-feeding larvae hatch from those ghost shrimp eggs instead of the mini-adults that hatch from RCS eggs. They often die because there isn't enough food in typical tanks. I wouldn't worry much about a population explosion from the ghost shrimp.