Need Advice From You Lot!..

Hi, welcome to the forum 

The baby biorb is fine for shrimps.

Shrimps are even more sensitive to poor water quality than fish are so if you want shrimps I would give very serious thought to doing a fishless cycle using ammonia. The method is here. But as shrimps have a much lower bioload than fish (ie they make less ammonia) you could use just 1ppm ammonia rather than the 3ppm mentioned in that link. But I would do a fishless cycle as any ammonia in the water - that is, ammonia made by the shrimps as a waste product - is toxic to them; as is the nitrite produced at a later stage of the cycle.

To do a fishless cycle, you'll need ammonia solution and a test kit. Ammonia solution is getting harder to find but some branches of Homebase have it in their household cleaning section. Failing that, Amazon or eBay have it.
Liquid reagent test kits are more accurate than strip testers. You need ammonia, nitrite and pH; a kit with those and nitrate is more economical than buying separately. On-line is cheaper than real shops. I have the API test kit but there are others on the market.

Taking a step back, you need a dechlorinator as soon as you put water in the tank. And with shrimps, you need one that removes metals as well as removing chlorine. Almost all dechlorinators do this but read the pack to make sure.

Shrimps need places to hide. They shed their skins to grow* and they are vulnerable to predation till the new skin hardens. They don't know that there are no predators lurking in a shrimp-only tank. The baby biorb is not terribly big for decor, but a cave type ornament of some description and 'fluffy' plants will be fine. Real plants are better than fake but you can't plant them in the rocks on the bottom. You might be able to squeeze in a coconut shell with java fern attached to it if you want real plants.

Cherry shrimps will eat algae, but a new tank won't have any. You will need to feed them, and even when you have grown some algae. I use Hikari Shrimp Cuisine for my shrimps - I couldn't find it in any shops so bought it on-line. I grind some of the pellets up fine so the baby shrimps can manage them. They won't need as much food as fish once algae grows.


Be careful when cleaning the tank. If you have males and females, you'll have babies and they are tiny. I suck up several shrimps every time I clean my tank. I siphon the water into a bucket, then empty the bucket with a jug checking for shrimps. My shrimps are in a 50 litre tank so checking the water from a 15 litre one won't take as long 



* You will find what look like dead shrimps on the floor of the tank. But shrimps shed their skins to grow and these discarded skins look incredibly like dead shrimps, only hollow. Don't panic when you see shrimp moults