I've seen a few pics of people's tank recently and they seem to have a mixture of red rilli and light blue coloured shrimp together. I'm assuming these guys don't necessarily breed true? If rilli's breed other colours do they still need to be separated, or can you then keep them all together? Or would they breed bad offspring?

 

I've got a few shrimp tanks setup now and would love to learn more about breeding etc so I do the right thing ?

Gday mate,

The same variety of shrimp such as cherry shrimps will breed together regardless of colour and yes this can ruin your gene and colour pool. Same goes for CRS and CBS you dont want to have them in the same tank cause you will end up gettin crystal brown shrimp 

With the Rili if it has the blue gene - Red Rili Blue Gene - you can get the start of a blue velvet colony. The blues don't breed true for several generations and you need to keep culling until you have a nice deep blue.  So in this instance you initially have the 2 different colour types without getting the wild type. But you should eventually separate all the blues from the Rilis. I will see if I still have some pictures

These are the Rili and then the Blue Velvet they breed after several generations of selective breeding. But you will have to separate them. These babies were about F4 so that's 4 generations of breeding the bluest back to each other in this case. Most Neo colour varieties will revert to a clear wild type when left to breed with other colour Neo .

Thanks so much for the info! There's so much to learn, I'll definitely be keeping the different colours separate. I've got some young red Rili at the moment, and can't wait until their old enough to breed. Will they be likely to produce other colours then?