Instructions
Set up a freshwater aquarium that is large enough to keep a breeding population of ghost shrimp. The tank should be 10 gallons or larger in order to house the population comfortably. If the tank is to be shared with other species, make sure they are non-aggressive types that won’t eat the shrimp. Set up the tank with gravel, a filter, light and aeration. Get sinking pellets to feed the shrimp.
Use a side filter rather than an under-gravel filter. Once you have young ghost shrimp, they will be small enough that they can fit between the rocks and be sucked into the large holes that under-gravel filters have.
Add a few areas in the tank for the ghost shrimp to hide. The species love to hide under things, so provide castles, rocks or other items that the shrimp can crawl into.
Put several males and several females together. You can tell females by their larger size. They often have small green dots underneath their abdomens. These are eggs that will eventually hatch into the baby shrimp. A female whose eggs have already hatched will have tiny pink dots under her abdomen. These are the tiny babies that are clinging to their mother.
Take the females who have visible eggs or babies into another tank or into a special breeding area of the same tank. A new tank should be a similar size and set up as the old one. A breeding area is a closed-off portion of the main tank. But unless the closed-off breeding area is completely closed, the tiny baby shrimp may escape and be eaten by the other fish and shrimp in the tank. The safer option is to remove them to a completely separate tank until they grow larger.
Take the mother out of the fry tank after the babies have hatched. If the babies are clinging to the mother, place some feed in the water to try to draw them away from her. Feed the babies young brine shrimp. The younger the baby brine shrimp, the easier it will be for the baby ghost shrimp to eat them. Once the babies are about half an inch long, they can be taken out of the fry tank and placed into the adult tank.
How to Breed Ghost Shrimp
Ghost shrimp make the perfect food for many fish, and they also make interesting pets in their own right. To keep a ready supply of live food, or to breed ghost shrimp as pets, there are some conditions that must be met for the successful fertilization and raising of the babies.