Vol. IV · Spring 2026 · No. 12
A journal for the obsessive art of keeping freshwater shrimp
Featured Species
The shrimp that started a hobby. SSS grade. TDS 80–120. pH 5.8–6.8. Temperature 68–74°F. Every parameter matters. Every molt is a small triumph.
Water Chemistry
The tank breathes at night. CO₂ accumulates, pH dips, and KH buffers work silently. What you measure at 6am tells a different story than noon.
Marguerite Holloway · 8 min read
Colony Spotlight
A single copper-threaded fertilizer tablet. An entire colony of SSS Crystal Blacks gone in four days. The grief is real, and so is the science of starting over.
Daniel Osei · 12 min read
Periodical Subscription
Delivered quarterly. No noise, no velocity. Just careful writing about careful keeping.
My interest:
Breeding Journal
Color genetics in Neocaridina davidi are messier than the grade names suggest. Here is what a decade of selective breeding taught me.
Priya Nair · 6 min read
Tank Diary
Indian almond leaves, alder cones, and cholla wood are not decorations. They are infrastructure. A diary of one tank's first six months.
Tomás Reyes · 10 min read
Editorial Philosophy
Most aquarium content is optimized for clicks. Molt is optimized for the keeper who has already watched a berried female fan her eggs for three weeks, who has already lost a colony they spent two years building, who already knows that a pH swing of 0.3 at the wrong moment is not an abstraction — it is a catastrophe.
We publish slowly because the hobby rewards the slow. A breeding journal written over eighteen months contains information that no three-minute video can compress. A colony diary that traces five generations of selective breeding is a document. We want to publish documents.
Every piece we publish goes through a review by at least one working breeder and one person who has failed at the thing being described. Failure is the credential we trust most.
What We Believe
A $2 shrimp deserves the same rigor as a $200 fish.
Invertebrate husbandry is systematically under-documented. We are correcting that.
The hobby is not a market. It is a practice.
We do not accept sponsored content. We do not recommend products we have not kept shrimp with.
Failure is data. Publish it.
The copper spike, the pH crash, the failed remineralization — these are the most valuable records we have.
Patience is the primary skill.
Everything else — chemistry, genetics, tank design — is downstream of the willingness to wait and observe.
What We Publish
We don't publish beginner guides. We publish intermediate-to-advanced documentation for the keeper who already knows what a berried female looks like and wants to understand why she dropped her eggs.
Breeding Journals
Multi-generation selective breeding records. Culling ratios. The slow accumulation of pattern knowledge that takes years to build and minutes to lose.
Avg. journal length
Tank Diaries
From first fill to first molt to first berried female. The unglamorous reality of cycling a planted nano.
Species Profiles
Caridina, Neocaridina, and the hybrids nobody talks about. Written by breeders, not copywriters.
Parameter Guides
GH, KH, TDS, pH — the interactions, the edge cases, the things that kill colonies that nobody warns you about. Remineralization ratios. Seasonal variation.
Failure Reports
We publish what went wrong because failure is the most honest form of data. Every loss is a lesson, and lessons deserve documentation.
Who Writes Here
We do not commission content from writers who don't keep shrimp. Every contributor has water on their floor somewhere in their history.
Submit your colony journal →"The tank is a closed system. Every input is a choice."
Marguerite Holloway
Senior Editor · Water Chemistry
Former freshwater biologist, UC Davis
"Failure is the most honest form of data."
Daniel Osei
Contributor · Failure Reports
Lost and rebuilt four colonies. Published all of it.
"Selective breeding is a 5-year conversation with genetics."
Priya Nair
Contributor · Breeding Journals
CORAL Magazine contributor, 200+ breeding cycles documented
"Indian almond leaves are infrastructure, not decoration."
Tomás Reyes
Contributor · Tank Diaries
Botanist, documenting the intersection of plant science and invertebrate care
Submit a Colony Journal
If you have been keeping a breeding journal — even an informal one, even one full of failures — we want to read it. We accept submissions from any keeper with at least six months of documented observation.
Subscribe to the Next Issue
Molt publishes four issues per year. Each issue contains two to three long-form pieces, one species profile, one parameter guide, and one failure report. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is sponsored.
Subscribers receive the issue one week before public release, plus access to the raw data appendices — the parameter logs, the culling records, the remineralization spreadsheets that don't fit in the published piece.
Spring 2026 Issue — In Progress
Five Generations of Cherry Red: A Selective Breeding Record
What Substrate Does to KH Over Two Years: A Longitudinal Study
The Taiwan Bee Problem: Hybrid Fertility and What It Means for Serious Breeders
Failure Report: Losing 200 Neocaridina to a Dosing Error
Free. Quarterly. Unsubscribe at any time by replying to any issue.
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Have records worth publishing?
Submit a Colony Journal instead →"The only publication I've found that treats shrimp keeping as the serious practice it is. The failure reports alone are worth subscribing for."— A. Watanabe, Crystal Red breeder, 11 years
