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Do any of you notice that your Neo's swim in circles around their tank? The colony of Neo's I bought have tripled their numbers in the past few weeks, from about 60 to 200+, with lots of new babies. Their tank is a 20 gallon long that is about 70*30*30cm. The water current in the tank is a very gentle flow from the top at one end to the bottom at the opposite end. Whenever I sit and watch them, about half are always swimming clockwise around the tank keeping next to the sides. They are semi-evenly spaced from top to bottom, with a few more at medium depth than at the top and bottom. They are also evenly spaced out in the parade, with equal numbers going left to right at the rear of the tank as there are going right to left at the front of the tank. Occasionally a single shrimp will swim a short distance in the opposite direction to the parade, but these are normally just swimming a short distance from one plant to another to graze. The half that are not on parade will be either grazing on plants, eating at the large mussel shell where I drop their pellets, or hiding away in some hiding place. The size participants in the parade also seem normally distributed from the largest to tiny babies. As the parade adds and loses members over time, they remind me of line changes during an ice hockey match. Some leave parade to eat or rest, while others join in swimming along. The larger shrimp swim faster than the babies, but they otherwise keep a fairly orderly circle going about the same speed. It's not a breeding behavior, as the the parade consists of males and females with eggs at varying degrees of development. If anyone has noticed their shrimp swimming like this, I would love to hear about it. Especially since many of you are in the southern hemisphere, I wondered if they swim the other direction perhaps. I live in the US. I've watched and my shrimp always go clockwise whether the weather is a clear day with high atmospheric pressure or raining with low pressure.

Will work on it this weekend and send you a draft and I'm sure with others experience we could make it easier for people trying to balance this sort of issue. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Below is a video clip I uploaded to YouTube to show what I tried to describe. It is impossible to see the small babies that are also swimming along with the adults. When I first got them 3 weeks ago, they spent much of their day hiding, but began being more active after a few days. I can't say exactly when this circling behavior began. I first noticed it a week ago. The number that take part varies during the day. Sometimes there are only a dozen or so, but at other times more than 100 of them will be swimming around in their parade. During the past week that I've been specifically looking for this behavior, I have not ever look in on them without seeing a few doing their circumnavigation of their world. I added the calliope music afterwards, so it is not that they think the circus has come to town. ;-) Although he was eating shrimp chow when I was recording this video and can't be seen, there is one male in the colony that I call easily tell apart from all the others due to him being blue and green, while the others are red or a wild looking brown. Yesterday I watched him make at least 4 complete trips around the tank before he realized that there were new pellets to eat in their feed bowl. I don't know how long he had been swimming before I sat down to watch them, but the distance I watched him swim was the equivalent of me swimming 500 meters at top speed without slowing down, which I cannot do.

Hi @Martib, most black lines carry Reds - known as Bloody Mary shrimp- and also blue - known as Blue Diamond. I have found nearly all my blacks even when put to only the blackest mate have still given a small proportion of blues and Reds. I did get the blacks to breed fairly true for several generations but then still started seeing a few blues and Reds show up. I have seen adverts for blacks that breed true but most lines seem to have a few other colours show up. The blues and Reds from black are also hard to get to breed 100% true. Most other colour Neos do breed true but not these it seems - I wouldn't argue with anyone saying theirs breed true but over the course of 4-5 years mine never did .