The tank itself is the main course
Ask what cherry shrimp eat and the honest first answer is: the aquarium. Every submerged surface in a mature tank grows biofilm — a living layer of bacteria, algae and microscopic life — and a cherry shrimp spends its day walking that layer, picking at it with tiny claws and eating almost constantly. Decaying plant matter and soft algae join the menu. This is why shrimp thrive in established planted tanks and struggle in sterile new ones: their food has to grow before they can graze it. A colony in a well-grown tank may need surprisingly little from you, and that restraint is the skill.
Farming their food: leaves, moss and surfaces
Shrimp keepers feed the biofilm as much as the shrimp. A dried leaf — oak or Indian almond are the usual choices — sinks, softens and becomes a slow-release grazing field that the colony works for weeks, babies included. Mosses and fine-leaved plants do the same job standing up, offering huge surface area in a small footprint and shelter for shrimplets in their first days. Even the sponge over a filter intake becomes a popular feeding station, gathering fine particles in a current. Arrange the tank with these grazing surfaces in mind and the colony's background diet largely takes care of itself, in a way no pellet schedule can imitate.
Supplements in shrimp-sized portions
On top of the grazing, offer a deliberate food a few times a week: a small piece of shrimp pellet, a sliver of blanched courgette or spinach, or a fragment of algae wafer. Portions should look absurdly small — a pea-sized amount serves a whole colony — and a feeding dish on the substrate keeps the mess in one place so leftovers can be lifted out. Mineral-rich foods earn their place in the rotation because shrimp build a new shell at every moult and draw on minerals from food and water alike. The occasional protein needs no help from you — the colony will quietly recycle a dead snail or tankmate on its own.
The overfeeding trap
In shrimp keeping, kindness and overfeeding look identical, and the second one crashes tanks. Shrimp water is usually a small volume, and food the colony ignores begins fouling it within hours; fuzzy, uneaten pellets and a sudden restlessness in the shrimp are the early warnings. A useful test is appetite itself: a hungry colony swarms an offered pellet within minutes, while shrimp that wander over it indifferently are telling you the tank is already feeding them. Feed two or three times a week, watch the response, and remove anything untouched after a couple of hours. With tiny volumes, subtraction is a feeding skill.
Babies, moults and the shells they leave behind
A breeding colony runs two extra diets in the background. Newly hatched shrimplets are too small for pellets and live entirely on biofilm, which is why moss and leaf litter double as nurseries. And when a shrimp moults, it leaves its old shell on the substrate — leave it there. The colony eats the empty shells and recovers the minerals in them, a small recycling loop that is part of the diet. Steady grazing, light supplements, shells recycled: the pattern is modest but easy to break with generosity. KinsLe's Care Teams fits that modesty — set the supplement as one person's twice-weekly duty, marked done with a timestamp, and nobody else in the house adds a well-meant extra.