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?

 

 

Fire Brown possibly but not painted as the legs are not solid brown. Nice colour btw.

So solid coloured legs makes for painted, but the stripe down the back makes for fire grade? If by some chance they end up with both would that then make them painted fire?

I do like the browns but they have been disappointing in not actually throwing more browns. I think they also carry blue gene, so I am hoping the new blacks breeding with them start to produce more consistant colour aside from wild.

These browns are the remenants of some chocolates that I got ages ago but had a disaster when the tank was invaded by dragonfly nymphs and they hate almost all the shrimp.

No, the stripe doesn't have anything to do with the grade.

Fire = solid colour on the majority of the body

Painted Fire = solid colour on the body and legs

 

I used to have a ton of brown\blue\blacks in my old neo setup.

and blue from the brown