Do shrimps fight over food?

[Edwin]

Hi. I fed two pellets of food (about 2mm each) provided by a LFS and my 8 shrimps fought quite fiercely over them. The 2 big female shrimps would pounce on the small ones feeding on it and chase them away. Is that a sign that there's insufficient food in the tank? I just fed them last week actually and they finished the food within 1 to 2 hours. I have 5 Marimo ball of about 2 to 3 cm each in my tank and I do not have any of those macro algae that Mustafa sell since they do not deliver to my country. Any thoughts?

[Varanus]

Chasing each other and struggling over food pellets seems to be normal, even when there are plenty to go around (they seem to sense shrimp that are feeding sooner than the actual food), but they don't ever hurt each other as far as I know. You needn't worry though, as any individual shrimp can only eat a small amount of even a small pellet, they eventually drop it and another shrimp picks it up. In this way I think the food gets spread pretty evenly among the shrimp even though there are fewer pellets than shrimp.

Still, if you want to reduce chasing then you could add more pellets to the next feeding (or break them into pieces). If you add more pellets you'll probably want to also decrease feeding frequency to once every three weeks or a month, to be safe. All indications I've read here are that going crazy over high quality food doesn't mean the shrimp are starving, they just recognize that a pellet has a lot more to offer than biofilm.

I feed about the smallest pellets I can (the Hikari shrimp cuisine ones) and give about one pellet for every two or three shrimp in the tank every three weeks or so.

[Edwin]

Do the Marimo Moss provide food for them? I have been feeding nearly once a week but really small portions but so far they have been fine. Surprisingly one will moult the day after I have fed them each time for the past 3 weeks. Can't help wondering if that's a sustainable trend.

[Ace]

All should be just fine. The less you intervene, the better. Feed them as you have been. If you want to do something more for them, give them pulverized organic vegetable matter.

Scwabling over food is common.

[Varanus]

The shrimp don't eat moss or macroalgae directly, rather they scrub off the microscopic biofilm that coats the surfaces of those plants (and most surfaces in general). Biofilm makes up most of their diet, hence why they are fine going weeks or months or in some cases even years between having food added to the tank.