A shrimp colony asks for a holiday plan built on restraint. Prepare the tank several days before departure — a water change and a full test then, not on the morning you leave — and leave the lights on their normal timer so algae and biofilm keep growing on schedule. Feeding shrinks to almost nothing: the colony grazes biofilm, leaf surfaces and the film on the glass all day, so a tiny portion once or twice across a week is plenty, and even that is optional for a short trip in a mature tank.
The Basics First
The risk on holiday is rarely hunger; it is kindness with a tap. Evaporation lowers the water level, and a helpful sitter who tops up with untreated tap water can shift temperature, chlorine and hardness in minutes — in a small shrimp tank, that swing is the emergency. Leave a clearly labelled container of conditioned water, matched to the tank, with one instruction written on it: top up only from this bottle, only to the marked line. Put the same bluntness on the plants: no trimming, no fertiliser, no tidying while you are away, because a planted shrimp tank left exactly as it was is a stable one.
Practical Steps That Help
Leave the sitter a short list, in this order of importance:
- Top up only from the labelled bottle of conditioned water, to the marked line
- Feed at most the single portion in the labelled pot, on the day marked
- Leave lights and timer exactly as set — no extra hours for viewing
- Do not clean the filter, trim plants or add any treatment
- Photograph the tank and send it to you if anything looks cloudy or still
Walk the sitter through the tank once before you go, pointing at the bottle, the pot and the waterline mark rather than handing over a page of theory. A two-minute rehearsal at the glass prevents the improvisation that a written note alone sometimes invites.
Keeping It Going
Come home to a colony that has carried on without you: shrimplets graze the glass, moults sit on the substrate, and the water has held steady precisely because nobody intervened. Test before you change anything, resume the normal feeding rhythm gradually over a few days, and check the filter flow — a fortnight of quiet growth can slow it. Note what the sitter actually did, while it is fresh, so the next trip starts from a plan that has already worked once. For the handover itself, KinsLe's Care Pass gives a sitter a time-limited link, openable without an account, scoped to this tank's routine while you are away.