I will never understand why we panic in this hobby about copper and other heavy metals. Unless you want to talk about specific poisonous heavy metals like lead or mercury. But if these are coming out of your tap above the safe legal limits then there are more important things to worry about then its effect on your fish. Copper, scary copper is a ESSENTIAL trace element for ALL living organisms. Your shrimp, fish, and you need copper to survive. If anyone was ever successful in completely removing copper from their aquarium every living thing in it would suffer, down to your beneficial bacteria. Luckily despite alot of peoples attempts to remove it from their water via various means like binding it up with Prime and using RO. You can not get rid of it completely. Most here probably never knew it but they add heavy metals including copper every time they feed their fish. Now you can all panic about the fish food poisoning your fish and inverts or you can finally realize maybe, just maybe those things are there for a reason. Quite a few other heavy metals are also essential trace elements: Iron, zinc, manganese, molybdenum, and cobalt. Iron, copper, and zinc are the ones often found in tap water, along with nickel which isn't essential or toxic but is important. Most of these are present in very trace levels in tap often measured in PPB(parts per billion).
Below is what comes out of my tap in PPM since its more familiar for most of us, we have a old gas water heater that stores the hot water in a enclosed metal tank. The water is from our well, house has copper pipes and is 30 years old. Water is run for a minuet or two before taking a testing sample.
Iron-0.002-0.3 PPM
copper- 0.001-0.13 PPM
Lead- 0.002-0.015 PPM
I don't add a single thing too my water except fertilizers, no dechlor or binding compounds. Hose from tap to tank 50% WC weekly with matched water temp. I breed cherry shrimp and have spawned a number of different species of fish in it. Now of course not all water is the same. Since we are focusing on copper here the max limit in drinking water in the US is 1.3 PPM. A high level like this will certainly be lethal to shrimp, but in all likely hood your water will be tasting like pennies too. All these elements have a lethal concentration that varies for each organism and is effected by other factors in the water. Again too little and too much can be a bad thing.
As far as food goes some like my Hikari lists the amount of copper it contains. Again these traces will not harm anything in the tank. Most foods don't list it in the analysis, but its right there in the ingredients list. Often its surrounded by the other heavy metal compounds. All the prepared fish foods I have ever looked at have some of these ingredients. Copper sulfate is what is added to food for supplying copper, it is almost always in fish food. Those familiar with compounds in this hobby will recognize this as a active-ingredient in many anti-ich/parasite medications(coppersafe is one). Again the only difference here is concentration and the fact that even your sensitive shrimp are not going to flop over at trace levels of copper and heavy metals. Its not even a issue for fish, because like stated above treating fish using copper is very common in this hobby. The rest of the common heavy metal ingredients in food are: ferrous sulfate(iron), Zinc sulfate, manganese sulfate, and cobalt sulfate. Most all foods from tetramin to NLS have most of these.
So. What does it all mean? It means if your afraid, unsure, confused, ect... you can still do the regular procedures for heavy metal "removal". Since you feed them to the fish anyway. Plants may suffer though depending on tank setup. Or you can throw your hands up in the air like you just don't care.
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