Descripción
The Blue Dream is an opaque, dense cobalt blue covering the whole body. It does not exist in the wild: it is the result of generations of selection from mutations in the same species as the Red Cherry, Neocaridina davidi.
Its care is identical to any Neocaridina, and everything said about the Red Cherry regarding copper, moulting and minerals applies here exactly. What changes is what you must do to keep the colour.
Never mix it with another Neocaridina variety. This is the mistake that ruins the most beautiful colonies. Red Cherry, Yellow Fire, Green Jade and Blue Dream are the same species, they interbreed freely, and within two or three generations the whole colony reverts to the mottled brown of the wild ancestor. There is no way back: once the colour is lost, it is lost.
And even without mixing, the colour degrades on its own if you do not select. Every brood produces paler or translucent individuals, and letting them breed drags the whole group down. Keeping an intense blue line means removing those shrimp and moving them elsewhere or giving them away.
It lives with the same tank mates as the Red Cherry: snails, otocinclus, corydoras and fish too small to eat them. With shrimp from another genus, such as Amano or Caridina, there is no hybridisation problem.
Hábitat
It has no wild habitat of its own: it descends from the same stream populations in Taiwan and southern China as the rest of the Neocaridina. The setup it needs is identical: moss, fine-leaved plants, leaf litter and gentle flow.
There is one aesthetic nuance worth noting: blue reads far better over dark substrate. Over pale sand the shrimp also tend to look washed out, because they adjust their tone slightly to the background. If you bought Blue Dreams and they look faded, try changing the substrate before assuming you were sold poor stock.
Like the rest of the genus, it thrives in mature tanks with plenty of biofilm-covered surface and struggles in newly set up ones.