Hi all!

Just registered to this forum and I've been hovering some threads trying to learn as much as I can.

So, a little background... I'm a 23 years old Portuguese fish keeping fanatic for the last 13 years and I recently became fascinated with shrimps so I decided to get some from a friend that I met back in college. I bought 10 red cherry shrimps as I knew they were the guppy equivalent to shrimps and my friend threw in a couple of red rillies in the bag.

After keeping the small colony in my community tank with some tetras and similar small sized fish for some months, it grew in numbers until, last February I decided to go a little bit deeper. I started researching shrimp grades and came across some really confusing terms... I prepared a tank and separated about 5 red cherries with some ok-ish solid color. By this time I knew that those 2 red rillies were going to cause me trouble, since my goal at this point was to go from red cherries to Fire Red or Painted Fire Red(a bit confused in this part yet, so I appologize for that). Even though I knew that going from lower quality shrimps to higher quality was way more time consuming and more work needed to be done than starting with already a good batch, I thought that since I started with shrimps to learn, I might as well start from the bottom and understand how is the process of having good quality shrimps step-by-step.

Mid-February I had my first shrimplets from those 5 that I had previously separated, and surprise surprise, about 5 red  rillies mixed in there. What started bugging me, was the color of the new shrimps. Even in my community tank, where I've left the majority of the initial colony, just in case, the color was nothing like this! My red cherries (maybe low "grade" Sakura) were orange! I started thinking how did that happen, and in the meanwhile I just let the small shrimps grew and waited for the next eggs to hatch (since by this time I already had 2 more female carrying eggs [is this the "berried" term that everyone talks about?  Female with eggs??]). I started to give my shrimps more vegetables thinking that maybe it was the food that was causing the color change. And then again, more oranged-colored shrimps hatched....

I was getting really worried I was doing something wrong and so I reached one of my colleagues from college who is a serious shrimp breeder. He told me that I should separate those orange cherries, as they were low graded ones, and gave me a shrimp food from the company he works at.

While I try to solve the color problem, I'm selecting the shrimps that have more similarities with sakuras, even though the color is definetly not there, but atleast I'm trying to get rid of the rilly patern in this colony.

And here I am! Finally founded a nice place on the web to learn more about how to keep shrimps, and dear lord I have a lot to learn after looking some of the topics that exist here!

Sorry about my long monologue and for my english, and I hope that my experience doesn't make you want to throw a brick at me! hehe

 

Take care! :D

Welcome to the forum, such a good introduction i must say. 

I look forward to seeing your future developments :)

Thank you so much! I kind of missed the dynamic of forums :)

Welcome!! This forum is great for feeding the addiction haha. Looking forward to hearing the news from your shrimp colony!

Welcome! Cool story and time to start saving for more tanks. It's the inevitable haha. First step is accepting your addiction[emoji14]

Oh boy.... It seems that I'm in trouble ?

This was the one I initially selected for this new colony (is it close to sakura, by the way?)

And this one, even though is still young has a much lighter more orangy color that I talked about.

 

Thank you for taking the time to welcome me :D

I wouldnt mix those 2 the colors are too difderent and will probably wash out the color of that first 1

23 hours ago, Barbatanas said:

Oh boy.... It seems that I'm in trouble 

This was the one I initially selected for this new colony (is it close to sakura, by the way?)

And this one, even though is still young has a much lighter more orangy color that I talked about.

 

Thank you for taking the time to welcome me :D

Welcome to SKF

Yes that does look atleast sakura grade

8 hours ago, OzShrimp said:

I wouldnt mix those 2 the colors are too difderent and will probably wash out the color of that first 1

But is it just genetic? Because I don't seem to have any red shrimplets, only this washed out color. 

26 minutes ago, Disciple said:

Welcome to SKF

Yes that does look atleast sakura grade

Thank you :)

 

I think I'll need to open a new thread on the neocaridina davidii subforum, so I can get these types of question answeared in the appropriate place.

I may be way off but that less colourful one seem to be a male? I think the males are generally not as nicely coloured as the females?

2 hours ago, Santa said:

I may be way off but that less colourful one seem to be a male? I think the males are generally not as nicely coloured as the females?

But all the shrimps that were born on this tank are that color. It just seems weird for me. I mean, if it was stress os water quality, all of them would have that discoloration and not just the ones that were born in here. Maybe it's the diet causing that, or just genetics? I don't know... I'm quite confused at this moment.

Meanwhile, as I said, I'll open a thread in the right subforum, so that if someone else has/had the same problem they have a topic with the discussion there. :)

Great introduction and welcome to the forum