Fwiw, copper in food is unlikely to harm shrimp unless it's in very high amounts. It's often part of the mineral supplement. It is copper dissolved in water that harms inverts, which is why so many snail removers are copper based.
Ghost shrimp do breed entirely in fresh water unlike many members of their family that need brackish water for the zoeys to live in, as the larvae are called.
Females will have eggs often if you have both sexes. They carry them in the abdomen, they are very easy to see. As they grow, they drop down lower and lower. The female will fan them with her swimmerets to keep them clean, and about 3 or 4 weeks after they appear, one day, they'll be gone. She'll have let them go.
They don't become babies like cherry shrimp. Eggs newly let go float to the surface and hatch there very soon. These are larvae, or zoeys and take about four days at average temperatures to morph into something that resembles the adult. Then they tend to hang just below the surface during the day, and sink down at night, into the plants if there are any. They look like they are sliding up and down a spider's line. They do like plants, to hid in when they are tiny.
Once they have moulted several times, and get to be about a quarter inch long, they start to swim a bit. You can see them jerk when they grab a food item. By then I was feeding them live banana worms. They soon being to behave just like the adults and crawl all over eating biofilm off everything, but mainly the bottom and wood.
They don't survive mostly, because fish eat them & filters grab them. But if a tank is mature enough to have enough micro organisms in the water for the larvae to eat, they will live long enough to morph, and some may survive. I've bred them, and had them breed in a 30 G tank with numerous fish, filtration, etc. Considering how many eggs are released, the survival rate is very low, but I've had them grow up to be adults in their turn. I have never been able to see the eggs once they are released nor the zoeys, they are very tiny. Newly morphed shrimplets are not much over a eighth inch long, not counting legs and whiskers.
They don't live too long. A couple of years at the very most.. longest I've had one live is about a year. They are fun to breed, but you pretty much have to put them in a tank without fish to get any numbers, and if the tank is not old, you have to feed them something. I culture single cell algae, 'greenwater', and fed them that, as the tank I used was newly set up. First time I tried I raised about forty of them to juvie size, about 3/4 inch long, then put them in the 30G with their parents.
Like all shrimp, they are very sensitive to nitrites and ammonia, as well as high nitrates. Far more than fish are. They need clean water to really thrive.
The larvae that don't make it, I hope go to feed my filter feeding shrimp, at least in part, since the eggs do float, which means they don't all get sucked into the filter.
Btw, you can get prefilters, sponge ones are great, to put on the intake tube of a filter and that will stop eggs and larvae and baby shrimp and fish too, from being sucked up. It also grows a lot of biofilm which is a favourite food source for most shrimps. They love picking at a nice aged sponge and will spend a lot of time on one.
They will eat almost anything. Algae, pellets, flakes, whatever, but they prefer it fresh, not so much left over. Snails are the left overs specialists. I get a kick out of watching the shrimp grab newly added pellets to race away, hanging on for dear life, only to let it go when they realize it has not softened enough to eat yet. They often argue over bits of choice pellet.
It is a shame they are so often used as feeders, I think they are quite charming little guys all on their own, even if not so colourful as Neos and Crystals.
As they age, their shells will darken over the back to a shade of orangey brown, and they get some dark marks on the shells. Many also have a bright orange band around the 'wrist' and a bright orange 'dash' mark on each of the four tail fans. I am not sure why they don't all share the orange markers, but many have them. Have to look closely but if they are there, you can see them by the time they are juvies.