Breeding
Breeding Ghost Shrimp: An Honest Guide
8 min read · Updated April 2026
Ghost shrimp breed constantly and almost never successfully in a normal aquarium. Understanding why saves a lot of frustration: unlike cherry shrimp, which hatch as miniature adults, Palaemonetes paludosus hatch as free-swimming larvae that need different conditions and different food.
Identifying a berried female
Females are larger, with a deeper abdomen. A berried female carries a visible cluster of 20–30 greenish or grey eggs beneath her tail, fanning them constantly with her swimmerets. Eggs darken as they develop and hatch in roughly three weeks.
Why larvae die in a normal tank
Newly hatched larvae are tiny, planktonic and drift with the current — straight into filter intakes. They also cannot eat anything you would normally feed a tank, and most sources report far better survival in slightly brackish water, which reflects the species' natural life cycle in coastal freshwater systems that connect to brackish estuaries.
A nursery that works
- Move the berried female to a separate 5–10 gallon tank before hatching
- Air-driven sponge filter only, never a powered intake
- Return the female to the main tank once larvae are free-swimming
- Raise salinity gradually to roughly 1.005–1.010 specific gravity with marine salt
- Feed powdered spirulina, infusoria or green water several times daily
- After two to three weeks, as larvae settle and take on adult shape, drip them slowly back to fresh water
Set expectations
Even with a dedicated nursery, survival rates are modest and highly variable. Most hobbyists find it far more practical to buy replacement stock and treat the occasional berried female as an interesting thing to watch rather than a production plan. If you want a shrimp that colonizes a freshwater tank on its own, cherry shrimp are the species for that.