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They really are so pretty!! And I just got home from dinner with friends and my big yellow mama is no longer full of beady little eyes, so I have more babies floating around somewhere!! I'm now going to dive into a google black hole and attempt to discover everything I possibly can about wild and river shrimp. I'm so glad you said about the possibility of a different origin for that odd looking shrimp, because I believe after so many hours staring at my sweet little pals I've noticed that there seems to be small but destinct differences in the shrimp face/head, the antenna thingys (having a brain fart) This really does get stranger and stranger, and of course the cheeky little bugger in question is nowhere to be seen today ? Gosh the curiosity is maddening!!! And my first Cherry's came from a store, the blue ones from Gumtree, so absolutely no special anything. I'm also very appreciative of your advice with my snail, I can really over think things, and I'm used to seeing newbies getting ripped to shreds on Facebook. I really appreciate how welcoming and knowledgeable the members here are.

The blues and yellows are very pretty and great to see the shrimplets as well! I am leaning towards the other shrimp may not even be a cherry shrimp at all (maybe some sort of river shrimp), but maybe some kind of native shrimp, especially if it is bigger and growing faster. It may be a low quality stardust but I don't see any 'stars' as such, unless they come later on when the shrimp is more mature? Normally I would suspect it to be an amano but it doesn't really look like one of those? I think you will just need to give it a bit more time and just enjoy watching! I get the theory of blue and red makes purple but it isnt quite that simple with shrimps, mixing/crossing colours usually produces wild type boring (brown or clear) shrimps which is why many people keep only one colour in a tank, though even keeping just one colour requires culling to keep the colour good longer term! You will need to let them get to at least half full size though before you can decide on whicjh need to be removed! The snail adds another dimension to the tank but they can become a nuisance, but with the small tank you have it shouldn't be too difficult to keep on top of that. Adding calcium to feed the snail may not be a good idea as it will change/increase the TDS and I think GH (?), I would hold off from doing that for now, it looks well enough to me?

Ohh, I went back and watched my video again, my purple/blue sparkly phone cover is reflecting back on the glass, and you can tell I haven't quite got the hang of my Samsung camera yet ?

Thank you ? I do have a small 3w LED light that's attached to the back rim of the tank, but I only had my bedroom light on for the photos because one of my little blue guys is really jumpy and it was 11.30pm at night when I was twatting around because I couldn't sleep. Anywho, I'm determined to get a better look so I can figure out just what the heck this shrimp actually looks like in natural light, so I've opened my blind and I'll be back to either stare at them or put my phone on a tripod and see if I can just record a nice long video to look back on. I only have this from the same night I spotted the little guy- https://photos.app.goo.gl/5ndCQNiL9hWkMMNH8 I thought it would be impossible to have a purple Cherry because the blue shrimp are new, they joined the fam on the 10th Oct. So strange. Also, why has nobody told me that Caridina Serrata stardust exist?! ??? I've become some kind of obsessive shrimp fiend in 2 months, no regrets!!

I'm obviously learning a lot as I go, so I can see my large Mystery snail is starting to look a bit calcium deficient. I can't stop thinking about the mystery of the strange coloured shrimp. It looks to be older than my tank, maybe he's about 5 months old? Anyone else care to speculate? The only thing I haven't done correctly was not quarantining my first live plants and the 5 new blue shrimp, which is how I got the second tiny snail... But there's no way a baby or dropped egg could have hitchhiked and survived AND grew up to look purple or get my attention by looking genetically weird. And why now after 2 months? Logically it has to be a shrimp reverting to wild. What is happening in my tank?!? ??