My Snow Whites/Golden Bees

[s1l3nt]

It has been a while since I have posted and I promised @NoGi I would post some photos I took recently so here is a few shots for everyone to enjoy :) I have ~10 adults and ~5 juvies of these guys. The juvies look quite good, so I am hoping they will be of high quality in adulthood also. I had a female drop some shrimplets about 2 days ago now, so hopefully more quality shrimp too!

I am currently working on letting them get their numbers up, at which point I will begun "culling"/removing lower quality shrimp and working on getting their white as strong as possible as well as ensuring good colour throughout the shrimp and working on more colour into the legs. But this is a long way away at this stage!

Let me start with a freshly born shrimplet! This guy is a couple of hours old roughly:

One of my berried females (lower quality female but is very productive)

A female (She is my best female but have never seen her berried) - She is also a little smaller than others. Can shrimp be stunted/runts like fish can?

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the thread and shots :)

Edited December 23, 2015 by s1l3nt

[jayc]

Beautiful photography.

Oh and the shrimps aren't bad either.

[s1l3nt]

Thanks JayC! :)

On a side note - I fixed the last image, i didn't realise it was a duplicate until just now!

[OzShrimp]

Nice mate!, i used to love having snow whites a couple of years ago but they all died before i swapped to RO water. Kinda good  they died before they bred though cause didnt mix with my crs

[s1l3nt]

Thanks OzShrimp! The snow whites are really my favourite shrimp, maybe in some time I will hopefully have more for you to try if you are keen :) I havn't been usign RO water with mine, but will be after the prize I won today.

I only recently swapped them to CAL BEP and the ph is around 5.8-6.0 using regular tap water (we have soft-ish water here in Sydney). Before that I had 5-6 shrimplets drop in the old inert substrate (ph 7.4, gh/kh 3) but only had a few survive unfortunately (5 juvies). So fingers crossed from here on out I get higher rates, as I just had at least one female drop shrimplets (possibly two) and the others are close to dropping shrimplets also.

[OzShrimp]

I brought mine from Dean the previous owner of the forum when he was still in the shrimp game, they lasted about 2 weeks lol. Didnt have tds pen at the time and my town water was between 380 and 520 lol,

Their one of my favourites to. You should whack some snowballs in teh tank with them :P

you will have to get yourself some salty shrimp minerals and a tds pen now

[s1l3nt]

Oh nice! I can't remember who I bought these from but it was someone selling up his shrimp to move on to other things. Quality ranged from low to high but I was happy as! Took ages to find and gave me a good starting point!

Lucky for me @newbreed is awesome customer service! I asked him very nicely to swap the shirakura sand for SS gh+ and he kindly obliged. (Top service as per usual with newbreed!!). So I got quite lucky today! Wouldn't be possible without the great service from our sponsors. I also got a TDS pen recently so I am covered now to start working on my lines! 

Have plans to pick out my best male and 2-3 females and put them in an external breeder box to line breed... But trying to get my hands on those big 4.2L ones rather than the 2L. This however is proving to be an impossible feat right now!

[OzShrimp]

good luck with that! i wouldnt do it in summer if your using an external breeder box as the flow is not sufficient to maintain the cooler temps of the chilled tank water and susceptible to quick change on real hot days.

I have tried th separation thin in breeder boxes a few times and i end up putting them back in the tank lol. Like they say a watched kettle never boils so i ended up giving up lol

I have considered when i move next year if i am able to run my 4 ft divided tank put all my shrimp in one section, then selective breed in the second  whilst utilising the 3rd to hold my berried girls so that i can control the shrimplets when they grow 

[s1l3nt]

Thanks! Yes that is one of my concerns also... This is why I had planned to use a very small power head instead of an air lift version. Our apartment is air conned and the tank has fans over it which keep the tank at 24 degrees even on the 40 degree days (or multiple ones) as we run air con heavily on these days.

Haha yes I have a feeling this is what I will also do! But I would love to try and get it as I have some really nice shrimp that i'd like to try and get to breed together to improve my line. Eventually I might even set up a breeding tank for shrimp on the rack, at hte moment its full of CPD and apistos! haha.

I wish I had space for a 4 foot tank and less love for apistos (My favourite fish so i am a heavy collector of rare ones haha). But that sounds like a very nice tank to me! Lots of space used up this way though.

[OzShrimp]

My favourite is my dedicated undivided 4ft tank though the only thing i regret is rather then a standard size i would of liked one which wasnt as tall but only cost me $120 brand new and its Dalbarb.

I plan on buying some of Ziss EZ breeding box eventually to retry the selective breeding process.

I have had a bit of an ongoing green algae problem which would end up on my other breeding boxes aand crap e though. Until i buy a house i dont think i will set up anything over the top 

do you have any plans to isolate the snow whites from the goldens at some point? Obviously it would probably take a bit to breed each other out of the genetics.

 

[s1l3nt]

My biggest tank is a 2 foot display tank :) These guys are in a 40x25x30 (aquaspace 40 i picked up from costco a while ago haha). I also have a breeding rack set up with a bunch of 45x30x30 tanks but these are all filled with fish, as well as a grow out tank for fry.

Too much light? I have had the same issue in my tanks too but I am 90% sure its due to high light and lack of plant growth. Have put a bunch of fast growing stems in now to see what happens.

Well to be honest, from speaking with Glenn, I consider them the same species just a different grade. At the moment I probably have 3-4 i consider high quality with as much white as possible. The rest are probably mid with 1-2 low grades. Once numbers go up a little bit (i only have ~10 adult at the moment) then I will start line breeding and working on stronger whites and white in legs also (most have colour in legs but only half way, etc). Long process but a bit of fun :)

[OzShrimp]

Been a while now @s1l3nt how are these coming along mate? Would love to see some updates. 

[s1l3nt]

@OzShrimp - Yes been a little quite! Been a busy few months for me hehe. Shrimp have been mostly on auto pilot, love how easy they are to keep! I will try to get some photos this weekend. 

Have moved from tap water to RO water now.

So far they are doing well, up until the point where I forgot to turn the filter back on after a water change.... Filter was off for 4 days in total, thankfully the tank is well planted and has floating plants, fixed this by replacing media with cycled media from other tanks and a bunch of prime and a lot more floating plants. Lost one of my adults which triggered the check for what is wrong, and the day after fixing the filter I lost a young adult shrimp (First generation offspring in my tank). Few days later my fans were unplugged... Tank got to 26 degrees and I lost a juvie. This is also fixed... Thankfully only those 3 were lost. 

I also did a water change without minerals in the RO water which brought down the TDS to 100 from 170. It was a 20% water change but effected much more then I was expecting! Which caused me to lose one young adult also. I was bummed and won't be doing that again!! So all in all, i've made a few mistakes which were entirely my fault! :(

On a positive note, my biggest most productive female FINALLY got berried again the day I fixed the fans, i guess a drop in temp triggered some molting. Nice full tail too! I currently have 2, possibly 3 females berried. One of these is my first generation (in my tank) females, though she only has a small number of eggs but at least I have more females! So very happy about that. Have a few young juvies growing up still. 

Hopefully that is the end of my dramas with the tank so the colony can grow! At one point I had 10 adults, 10+ juvies, and 10+ shrimplets. Not sure on numbers at the moment as the tank is over grown with flame moss which I am goign to trim this weekend. But i see the adults and juvies often. 

Still love watching them go nuts and turn into fish swimming around the tank when a female molts. :)

[Foxpuppet]

The rookie errors when your this far into shrimp keeping are the worst.... Happens to me too often ;)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[OzShrimp]

Good to hear things are still going alright, when i set back up a tank i plan on having snow whites. I wouldnt put the cause down simply to the temp rise with one of the losses when i first started keeping CRS many a year ago I had them in temps up to 28 degrees with nil issues. 

Sounds like you may have had a minute ammonia spike did you test when you didnt have the filter on at all ? 

 

Either good that things are back on track. What numbers are your colony at now ? 

[s1l3nt]

The rookie errors come with rushing in my opinion/experience. My wife is heavily pregnant and the last couple of months of life have been all over the place haha. 

I actually didn't test as I quickly did the fix before work. But the tank is heavily planted, and has lots of floating plants. It is most likely that ammonia/nitrite spike killed the shrimp I lost, more so than heat, I agree. Everything seems okay now though and have had no obvious losses.

To be honest, I am unsure of numbers but I believe it to be lower then a couple months ago. However, things seem to be getting back on track. I have 3 berried females now, 2 with nice heavy tails. I think there may be a 4th with only a few eggs but I can't be sure of this as I have not seen more than 3 berried in the open at once... So hopefully will see the numbers jump in the next month or so!

I also have to move house in the near future (couple months at best) :( So they will have to be "reset" again which I am hoping will not effect them too much.

[OzShrimp]

start cycling some sponge filters for your bucket to hold them lol :P

Still look forward to your progress and photos. When i reset up a tank i am going to go with Snow whites and hopefully be able to get ones which dont throw goldens as well