Feeding the shrimp

[Cakelake]

Hello! How do I know when I should feed the shrimp? I see lots of visible algae but they do move around a good amount during the day which might be indicating that they're searching for food as they can't easily find any. How can I tell if they need supplementary food?

[Varanus]

You'd have to go a long time before the shrimp would "need" to have food added, especially if you have visible algae. Your shrimp wandering around to forage is perfectly normal behavior and most likely means they simply have to move around to get enough biofilm, not that there isn't enough food at all. Indeed them not moving around to get enough can be a sign of an overabundance of food. As for when you "can" feed, that is something you may have to experiment with. Feeding every few weeks or few months are both valid ways of doing it. My tank has done pretty well with a feeding every three weeks (was feeding every two weeks until I had a feeding where the shrimp took much longer to eat everything and showed little initial interest).

The main thing to keep in mind is to not feed too much or too often. As a general rule if your shrimp and snails are excited about the food and able to eat all the food within a couple hours then you're doing fine and can feed a similar amount a few weeks later. When deciding on the amount to feed, go with less than you think is needed, at least until you have a handle on how much your shrimp can eat in a given time period. As with most everything related to supershrimp care, less is more.

[Cakelake]

Great! Thanks for the info!!

[Ace]

I say that you can feed as often as you like as long as you are making absolutely certain that you are not polluting the water with left over food.
I recently posted about how I feed them in Nanosphere 9. Give it a look. I basically power feed them to induce reproduction. They spend more time with food available than they spend without it.
The algae and biofilm are just background food while nerites keep the glass relatively clean.

[Varanus]

It should be noted that regarding what Ace says most of the users here feed infrequently and still have substantial reproduction. Also, the smaller tanks usually used for supershrimp are notoriously easy to pollute from overfeeding compared to larger tanks, which gives additional reason to feed infrequently. Indeed Mustafa recently related that in his experience more frequent feedings appeared to cause some shrimp deaths even when water tests said the water was still clean.

[Mustafa]

The method used on this website (as referenced and relayed by Varanus above) has been tested and proven for over a decade so it's pretty much foolproof. The problem with "feeding as much as possible" is that it pretty much fails in the end because problems pop up. Ace, in your case I can already see that you are starting to have a hair algae problem and some bubbles in your pictures looked like they were produced by cyanobacteria which are a pain to get rid of in the long term. Pretty much everyone that advocated the "feed a lot" method ran into problems in the end. They tend to then start changing water, which also isn't all that great for these shrimp in the long run as they need a stable environment for optimal breeding.

Some people have "success" with the "I feed all the time" method because their tanks are large enough to accumulate nutrients from the feeding for a while until it hits a threshold and things just literally go haywire. My 1.23 cents.