After a sad failed attempt at keeping/ breeding chocolate/ black cherry shrimp in a small tank (failed thanks to some sneaky damselfly nymphs), I gave up and ended up putting the couple of sole survivors in with my colony of Red cherrys. Then I had a drama with a malfunctioning heater that cooked most of the Red Cherry Shrimp colony. Now quite a few months later I am slowly getting the reds almost back to the quality I want, and the bland old wild type cherry shrimp I ended up with I put in my fish pond. After some time I ended up finding some more chocolates in the pond and I rescued them and thought I would try them again but this time in a tank with some fish so less chance of another nymph incident.

Now here are my ambitions.....

This lovely black girl I am hoping to get breeding with some of my darkest chocolate males until I get an entire tank of blacks like this stunner.

Then there is this rather nice but not so obliging Red that is the goal for the Red Cherry Tank.

 

Wow that red male is great!

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Great shrimp I like your ambition!

If that is a red male, he certainly will be amazing once fully grown. I had assumed because of its intensity of colour that it was a young female.

I am also guessing that the red cherry is what people would class red wine, although if it gets any darker it might be more a port wine.

I really am torn between which colour I prefer, by a whisker I think its the black in the lead, just because I have had the most problems with the blacks and just adore her colour and shine.

So much potential! If I had to pick one it'd be the black... it has the shine of polished onyx.

She is a real stunner and the other half gets rather annoyed when I call him over to admire her. His standard reply is a long suffering "(sigh) yes very nice....its a shrimp" but then he's also not interested in the amazing chameleon shrimp or my notopala or nerite snails. He does have a slight interest in zebra shrimp, but so fair I have failed miserably at keeping and breeding them. And riffle shrimp he does like but that's just because its fun to see them wiffling in the water.

Over the next few days I intend to do a major re-arrange of the black cherry tank, just so I can get out all the undesirables and hopefully condense the black gene to getting them breeding more true, with less of the clear, wild and brown continuing to add their genetics into the mix. It will be a red letter day when I finally see a baby black shrimp in the tank. Right now at a very rough head count without removing all the plants and obsticles in the tank I think I have 3 black girls like the one photographed. A couple of dark chocolate almost black girls, one with a brown paint stripe down her back. And at least two dark fully chocolate males which at a pinch I guess would be considered a brown version on red wine. If my understanding of the names is correct. With Red wines being a solid but clear red whereas painted have a solid matt colouration without being almost see through.