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Sounds like we have a few SKF members attending on Sunday 17th and a few interstaters on their way across/over/down for the event. Look forward to seeing you all there. Will make sure there's photos and hopefully even vids of the event to post. ?

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your compliment. @jayc and @Baccus About the species, I think there is 2 species in those pictures. Short rostrum should be Paratya caledonica And the long rostrum Paratya intermedia I collect them by myself. Done a selection, there are a lot of differents patterns/colors in those 2 species

This will be the following chart but with actual pics: View full article

It feels like an eternity since I had cherries in my tank but here a few shots I took today. Neocaridina davidi var Red (Brown lineage) aka "Bloody Mary" and I'd say Sakura grade.

I bought 6 of them. but could only find these 4 which handily enough decided to be close enough to fit into one pic! there is one on the plant (shadow left side) two on the ground (right below the plant one and on the brown rock) and one blending into the filter inlet (I swear it's there but it doesn't seem visible in the pic!) I'm happy to post more photos when I get better shots if you like :) I just took this one because you asked so nicely :) I would almost call these black shrimp but they do have a blue tinge when you see them in person.

I have a couple of these girls getting about in my tank (but stangely have not seen an obvious brown male only a potentially black male that is sort of clear), and have been wondering would they be called just brown? painted brown? (If my understanding of the matt stripe down the back signifies the painted term), or Chocolate? If Chocolate what determines them from just brown and are there grades of chocolate? In the same tank I also had at least 2 black females that cropped up unexpectedly, but I have never noticed these black females berried. I do see these girls berried quite often but usually all the babies seem to turn out wild colour, where as these girls where dark from day dot. I keep removing any wild colours and reds that pop up in the tank, in the hope that the sole blackish male is the sole breeder. Because I was getting a tad fed up with no real further development with these browns mainly no obvious brown or black offspring, I may have done something silly and added a group of Black Cherries that obviously are derived from Blue Gene Cherry (they where quite blue when I received them but now unstressed they have gone back to black), some of my reds I know carry blue gene already. So I guess I am hoping that adding the black cherries to the browns wont mean that I end up with yet more wild culls ( the other half is getting sick of me dumping them in his guppy tank and even the Pakastani loach wont eat the shrimp), instead I am hoping to get a higher ratio of either black or dark brown shrimp in each clutch of offspring. The new blacks when they arrived, sorry about the clarity but they would not stay still and hopefully you can see the blue in them. So have I made a mistake in deciding to mix these browns and blacks or should it give my little breeding project a major kick in the right direction?

I often see questions around culling and not selling culls etc.. Anyway, the main reason I cull is so that I can remove poorly coloured shrimp like: So that I can focus on breeding and improving quality of shrimp like: This is a new colony for me and I'm fortunate enough to get a pretty good start with some great coloured Bloody Marys. In the past I've started with nothing but quality similar to the first pic and it's a long and hard path but worth it in the end. All of the above are Sakura grade btw even though some of the pictures look a little on the higher side there are still a lot of patches of transparency that aren't showing up in the images and the legs are not solid. The grading applied should be consistent with the male/female and offsprings. No point grading something as fire red if all the offsprings are of a lower quality. And a couple of pics of happy coexistence