Loaches Online Forum

Here's a picture of our Sakura shrimps with a shrimplet. We have around 75 little un's in the tank at the moment.

What a beautiful shrimp!!

Wow! I am absolutely impressed. Absolutely gorgeous. I have a few hundred Cherries, but nothing impressive like this. Thanks for sharing.

Hi, Graeme..,

That is a very impressive specimen! She looks quite large, too. The colour is so bold, and I love the eyes! I keep "Cherry Red" Shrimp as well, but I put it in quotations because there seems to be a lot of variety among them. Some of the females are a very vivid solid red, some have a bold orange splotch on their backs, some have black in them, and still others have white striped legs. I'm sure they have been mixed with other types somewhere along the lines. Do you see such variation in your Shrimps as well?

soul-hugger

soul-hugger wrote:.......some have a bold orange splotch on their backs

The orange/yellow saddles are eggs developing in the ovaries. Red Cherry Shrimp can show some variability in colour, and if you haven't added fresh brood stock in a while, you may see the effects of inbreeding, including smaller sizes and the occasional throwback to the original colouring, especially in the males it seems, who don't carry so much red anyway.

I have exceptionally few Cherry Shrimp now, especially since I covered my external filter intakes. Here's one of my old females before she died:

Hi, Bully..,

Thanks! That's neat to know. I always wondered why some of them are orange. The markings are definitely a saddle shape. I got my colony of CRS from my boyfriend who has added to the stock occasionally to introduce new genes. Still, it's hard to say where they came from.

Last night we moved tanks and I ended up with what was left of the colony. His Western Rainbowfish were eating them; they were supposed to be the smaller Maccullochi Rainbows and turned out to be the much larger Westerns. Beautiful fish, but in two months they reduced the colony from numbers in the thousands to less than a hundred.

I am amazed how you can get such clear and detailed pictures of them. I have tried to photograph mine with not much success. The camera is not great and the pictures always turn out grainy.

I'm also surprised how much I have come to like these little guys and also other Shrimp. At once I would have found it strange to have a "Shrimp Tank," but now I'm liking the idea. I've found that Riccia Fluitans is a great nursery for the baby Shrimplets.

soul-hugger

Awesome

Here's a half decent picture of one of the shrimplets. The substrate is sand as well.