Neocaridina "Skittles" tank question

[dangerflower]

I've decided to switch gears with my 10 gallon shrimp / rice fish tank. I have some yellow neos in there and I was originally going to do a shrimp only tank and try to get a big colony going but I've decided to add some more color varieties and do a "skittles" tank because I thought it would be fun to have more color in the tank and breeding perfect shrimp isn't my priority right now. I ordered an assorted pack from Aqua Huna that arrived today - I'm currently drip acclimating them 🙂

Here's my question. I know that mixing different colors of neocaridina leads to mostly brown wild-type offspring. But what I'm wondering is, does it make a difference if you only mix similar colors? I have another tank with blue dreams in it, so if I added any dark color shrimp to that tank (other blues, blue rillis, or greens) and then put the reds and oranges in with my yellows, would these two groups both be more likely to breed truer colors? Or does any mixing of genes yield just wild types? I know shrimp genes don't work like color theory 😅 but I was just curious.

[Fish Folk]

I cannot answer with authoritative experience. I’ve tried Red Cherry, Blue Dream, Green, Yellow, and Black. In the end I was only long-term-successful with Reds.

Here is a well-known Neocaridina chart:

[eatyourpeas]

The above chart is great! I have had mine revert to WT, then get back to color, then, and now I have what I call pajama shrimp: center part of their bodies are clear, and head tails are colored. 🦐

[Odd Duck]

On 3/30/2022 at 9:53 PM, dangerflower said:

I've decided to switch gears with my 10 gallon shrimp / rice fish tank. I have some yellow neos in there and I was originally going to do a shrimp only tank and try to get a big colony going but I've decided to add some more color varieties and do a "skittles" tank because I thought it would be fun to have more color in the tank and breeding perfect shrimp isn't my priority right now. I ordered an assorted pack from Aqua Huna that arrived today - I'm currently drip acclimating them 🙂

Here's my question. I know that mixing different colors of neocaridina leads to mostly brown wild-type offspring. But what I'm wondering is, does it make a difference if you only mix similar colors? I have another tank with blue dreams in it, so if I added any dark color shrimp to that tank (other blues, blue rillis, or greens) and then put the reds and oranges in with my yellows, would these two groups both be more likely to breed truer colors? Or does any mixing of genes yield just wild types? I know shrimp genes don't work like color theory 😅 but I was just curious.

Any mixing tends to revert back to wild type.  Apparently there are many loci for color so mixing colors tends to negate the color in the next generation.  Colors will randomly pop out when the right mix gets together.  Even mixing 2 types of blues can get you wild types.

Do you see how blue pearl, blue jelly, and blue dreams are from different sections of the chart?  And the same with Bloody Mary vs fire reds.  Or yellow rilis or sakuras vs. oranges (which in real life usually look pretty close).  Green jade vs green emerald (emeralds not on this chart) appear to have been developed from different lines, also, and mixing them can cause more wild types.  I certainly don’t consider myself anything remotely approaching a shrimp genetics expert but I’ve been doing some reading to try to figure out some of this.  It can be tricky if not impossible to try to keep multi colors together and still have pretty shrimp in the babies.  Some people have water parameters that let them put multiple species together so they put one color of Neocarindina and a different color and or species of Cardina since they don’t tend to hybridize.

[dangerflower]

On 3/31/2022 at 8:39 AM, eatyourpeas said:

The above chart is great! I have had mine revert to WT, then get back to color, then, and now I have what I call pajama shrimp: center part of their bodies are clear, and head tails are colored. 🦐

Pajama shrimp!! 😂 I love that.

@Odd Duck it's so interesting to see how similar colors came from completely different lines! These little guys have such complicated genetics

[Beardedbillygoat1975]

@dangerfloweryou nailed the genetic issues you can run into with mixing. However, you can get galaxy and purples if you work hard enough - reportedly LRB was about to release a purple line when being away he hjad a nitrate spike that wiped out the colony.

You will get some random colored shrimp pop out of the skittles tank with time. - the colors can be gorgeous, I had a black shrimp that was glossy and gorgeous. I added her to my experimental blue dream colony and I got a bunch of red rilis pop out. So yes using some of the shrimp from your skittles tank to enhance certain traits may work but because of such a diverse mix of genetics and because the base colors are red cherry and brown/grey/green mottled neos you will be taking a risk each time you intro a new mixed shrimp in. 

[Odd Duck]

On 3/31/2022 at 12:15 PM, Beardedbillygoat1975 said:

However, you can get galaxy and purples

I thought galaxy and purple were only in Caridinas?

[Beardedbillygoat1975]

Some of the German breeders have gotten a metallic line going, sometimes there are little sparkles within it and some breeders are calling them galaxy - essentially using the Caridina nomenclature. Purple lines or I should say stable purple lines have been sought after for some time. Last time I went down that rabbithole the lines tend to throw black roses and some off patterns ie they are not consistent. Reportedly LRB was getting 70-80% purple shrimp with that line he was developing but then lost all of them. It took him 5 years of work to get there. Part of his "collectoritis" is related to wanting to have multiple tanks of all his species to prevent an event like this. 

[Odd Duck]

On 3/31/2022 at 12:32 PM, Beardedbillygoat1975 said:

Some of the German breeders have gotten a metallic line going, sometimes there are little sparkles within it and some breeders are calling them galaxy - essentially using the Caridina nomenclature. Purple lines or I should say stable purple lines have been sought after for some time. Last time I went down that rabbithole the lines tend to throw black roses and some off patterns ie they are not consistent. Reportedly LRB was getting 70-80% purple shrimp with that line he was developing but then lost all of them. It took him 5 years of work to get there. Part of his "collectoritis" is related to wanting to have multiple tanks of all his species to prevent an event like this. 

Ooh, nice!  I’d love to get my hands on some of those!

Bummer that he lost such a promising colony.

[JettsPapa]

On 3/31/2022 at 10:39 AM, eatyourpeas said:

The above chart is great! I have had mine revert to WT, then get back to color, then, and now I have what I call pajama shrimp: center part of their bodies are clear, and head tails are colored. 🦐

Feel free to call them what you want, but there's already a name for those.  Look up rili shrimp.  I have a tank full of red ones, and have had a few blue ones in the past.  They're readily available.

[eatyourpeas]

On 3/31/2022 at 11:23 AM, JettsPapa said:

Feel free to call them what you want, but there's already a name for those.  Look up rili shrimp.  I have a tank full of red ones, and have had a few blue ones in the past.  They're readily available.

Ah, yes, I know, but I prefer Pajama Shrimp. Thank you anyway. 🙂

[Patrick_G]

@dangerflower, I think it’s really fun seeing what colors pop up in a tank of wild types. I’ve had black, blue, light green and various Pajama colors. The original females were yellow the first generation was brown but since then it’s been random. 

[dangerflower]

Thanks everyone for making me feel like this skittles colony is a fun experiment and not just a terrible idea! I'm excited to see what ends up happening with them.

I may ultimately end up switching my tanks around. My blue velvets who live with my Betta are really nice, but obviously not living in optimal conditions, so maybe someday I'll move them to the more shrimp friendly tank and put the experimental skittles into the Betta tank. But it seems like shrimp don't love dealing with new water parameters, so maybe not the best idea.

On 3/31/2022 at 10:15 AM, Beardedbillygoat1975 said:

@dangerfloweryou nailed the genetic issues you can run into with mixing. However, you can get galaxy and purples if you work hard enough - reportedly LRB was about to release a purple line when being away he hjad a nitrate spike that wiped out the colony.

You will get some random colored shrimp pop out of the skittles tank with time. - the colors can be gorgeous, I had a black shrimp that was glossy and gorgeous. I added her to my experimental blue dream colony and I got a bunch of red rilis pop out. So yes using some of the shrimp from your skittles tank to enhance certain traits may work but because of such a diverse mix of genetics and because the base colors are red cherry and brown/grey/green mottled neos you will be taking a risk each time you intro a new mixed shrimp in. 

Oh wow, purple shrimp! That's incredibly sad that he lost them.