is this common

[manda]

I just got 8 ghost shrimp. most of them are the biggest i have ever seen! my black neon tetras are teaming up on the big ones and eating some of their bodies. i see bodies, heads, etc laying around the bottom of my tank! and one black neon was swimming with a whole body in its mouth!
its no big deal to me, but i am wondering if this is common for black neons to do

[flamingo]

Everything eats ghost shrimp... and no it's not uncommon lol.

[starbuck]

my ghost shrimp were all eaten in one hour. only by my goldfish. the same goldfish.

[Giddy012]

I believe my Molly and Swordtail are eating mine

[manda]

ohhh okay. fine by me, i will just get more when i start running low. i bet its a healthy treat for them.

[Clerk]

When I had gold barbs in my 50 they made short work of my ghost shrimp. Now, when one dies a ram will eat it, but otherwise they do fine in my tank.

[MyraVan]

Geez, what carnage! I love shrimp, so I feel very sad to read this. (But then, I eat shrimp too, so obviously I'm no purist!)

But I wonder why they are going after your ghost shrimp, when my neon tetras left my cherry shrimp and Amano shrimp alone?

[manda]

well, i have black neons. and they are pretty big in comparrison to the little regular neons i see often.
but what is odd, a couple of shrimp are quite a bit larger than my black neons. i actually watched 4 of them get together and kill a shrimp. it was spooky!

[Plyr58]

what about bamboo shrimp? thinking of getting a couple and wondering if they can survive the carnage.

[MyraVan]

As I wrote in the thread "bottom feeder for my 10gal":

I don't think a bamboo shrimp is the best choice. They are very different from your average shrimp (Amano, cherry, ghost) because they are filter feeders. Their front legs have evolved into "fans" -- they look like lots of fingers. They spread these out to catch particles in the current. They can pick up particles from the substrate, but they have to be quite small particles. The best way to feed them is to put some very fine particles in the water column for them to filter out, like fry food, coral food, or crushed flakes.

I got 3 at the beginning of January, and just a couple of days ago one molted, then died. It seems that bamboo shrimps are prone to doing that and iodine (like you put in marine tanks, but at a much lower dose) helps them with this. So I've ordered some iodine and will start adding it to the tank. I feel that these are cool enough animals to make it worth the effort of taking good care of them so they can have a good long life in my tank.

So I would say that bamboo shrimps are not really easy-care animals, while the other shrimps I mentioned are, I feel. The other shrimps don't seem to have any problems molting (all the ones I've had have lived full lives without any added iodine) and they are very easy to feed, since they eat algae and leftover fish food.