Two species that want the same tank
Most compatibility questions weigh behaviour. This one is settled by conditions before behaviour even comes up. White cloud mountain minnows come from cool, flowing mountain streams and are happiest in water that many tropical fish would find chilly — the same unheated, room-temperature range where cherry shrimp thrive and breed best. Neither animal is being kept at the edge of its tolerance to accommodate the other, which is the hidden stress behind many pairings that look fine on paper. Add the minnow's temperament — small, schooling, entirely without malice — and its tiny mouth, and you have a fish that could not eat an adult shrimp even if the idea occurred to it, which it does not.
Even the babies mostly make it
Against a white cloud, a newborn shrimplet's odds are as good as they get with any fish in the tank. The minnows feed in the upper and middle water, picking at drifting particles, and they do not forage through the plants hunting. A shrimplet grazing moss at the bottom is below their world and beneath their notice. Provide the ordinary courtesies — a moss patch, some fine-leaved planting, a sponge over the filter intake — and a cherry colony in a white cloud tank typically does not just hold its numbers, it expands, sometimes to the point where the keeper is giving shrimp away. The minnows themselves may scatter eggs in the plants, and their fry, too, survive better alongside shrimp than alongside almost any other fish.
Snails complete a very easy tank
Nothing in a white cloud's behaviour touches a snail. Nerites, mystery snails, ramshorns, and trumpet snails all go about their work ignored, and the cool water suits most of them well. The one selection note is temperature tolerance at the coldest end: if the tank sits in a genuinely cold room through winter, choose snail species that share the minnow's hardiness rather than warmth-loving ones. Beyond that, the cleanup crew can be picked purely for the jobs you want done — glass, substrate, or leftover food — with the fish imposing no constraints at all.
Setting up the cool-water community
The setup honours where these animals come from. A gentle current from the filter, rounded gravel or sand, background planting with open swimming space at the front, and no heater in most homes — though a small one set low is cheap insurance in a cold house, and it protects the shrimp as much as the fish. Light the tank generously, because both species show their best colour under good light and the plants that shelter the shrimplets need it. Keep a group of eight or more minnows so the males display their fin-flaring courtship to each other, and fit a lid, since a startled white cloud can jump. Stock the shrimp first or the fish first; unusually for these questions, the order barely matters.
Why keepers return to this pairing
A white cloud and shrimp tank has a particular peace to it — red-finned minnows drifting in the current above a colony of shrimp grazing in full view, snails working the glass, nobody hiding, nobody hunted. It is also forgiving: cool water holds more oxygen, slows algae dramas, and tolerates a missed water change better than a warm tank does. For a household's first invertebrate community it is the pairing experienced keepers recommend without hedging. Note on the tank's KinsLe Family Sharing profile that this one runs unheated and who feeds on which day, and the calmest tank in the house mostly runs itself.