Descripción
The Yellow Fire is an intense lemon yellow that looks spectacular against dense planting and dark substrate. It is the variety that contrasts best with the green of a planted tank, which is how it carved out a place alongside the Red Cherry.
It shares parameters, behaviour and care with the rest of Neocaridina davidi: no copper, minerals for moulting, never mix varieties. But it has one practical quirk worth knowing before you buy.
It is the variety that loses colour fastest on a poor diet. The yellow depends on pigments the shrimp obtains from food, and in a tank with barely any biofilm and generic feed it fades within weeks until it is almost translucent. It is not sick: it is badly fed.
The fix is simple and cheap: spirulina-based foods, dried Indian almond or beech leaves on the bottom, and a mature tank with colonised surfaces. With that the yellow stays intense for life.
There is a line called Yellow Golden Back, with a paler dorsal stripe running along the back. Same species, same care, but selected separately: mix the two lines and you lose the stripe within a few generations.
Hábitat
Like the other varieties, it descends from Southeast Asian stream populations, in temperate water with dense vegetation and a leaf-littered bottom.
In the aquarium what it looks for are biofilm-covered surfaces: mosses, roots, decaying leaves and any corner with a biological film. That is both its larder and its shelter during the moult, when it is most vulnerable.
And here it connects with the colour question: that biofilm is part of what maintains the yellow. A sterile, very clean tank with no leaf litter is precisely the worst place for a Yellow Fire, however counter-intuitive that seems.
Medium hardness, stable temperature, gentle flow. It lives perfectly well without a heater between 18 and 24 degrees.