These King Kong Shrimp I See Listed...

[demonte1997]

... What are they?

I assume they are the best of the best, so to speak, of crystal reds or whatever.

Are these really worth the $? Looks like they sell for around $30/ea on aquabid. I also see an odd shrimp called the Blue Bolt. Are these gimmicks?

[Mustafa]

No gimmicks. They are real and breed true with regard to being, say, pitch black with white stripe, although the individual patterning of the white can be variable. Although the original marketers/breeders won't say, these appear to be hybrids of black tiger shrimp with CRS and CBS. To make matters eve more complicated, the CRS itself may already be a hybrid of closely related species, and the black tiger shrimp is almost certainly a hybrid of wild tiger shrimp and bee shrimp. In fact I was standing right there in the room of the breeder (in Germany) where the first black tiger shrimp appeared among normal tiger shrimp. There was a bee shrimp (CBS) tank right next to it and he himself even speculated that a bee shrimp may have slipped into the tiger shrimp tank unnoticed. He later actually found a bee shrimp in there and hybrids, too, that looked intermediate between tiger and bee shrimp.

I was one of the first people out there many years ago who actually proved that tiger shrimp and bee shrimp hybridize and made pictures of the hybrids. Since then, people in various countries, like Germany and some Asian countries, have been going "nuts" on the whole hybridization thing. They'll hybridize all kinds of related species to see if they can come up with the next new "designer" shrimp that they can name and market. Pure capitalism at work. It kind of reminds of the mollies that you buy in fish stores nowadays...they are hybrids of who knows how many species of wild molly and nobody can trace them back to the original species anymore.

So, in short..that's what those new shrimp from Taiwan are...hybrids. They are not any more difficult to breed than CRS, but since they are new and still not bred in large quantities, they are super expensive. I expect the prices to come down considerably over the next year. I actually like the "taiwan bees", especially the panda and "king kong" and I will devote tank space to them once I have some more tank space (all 118 tanks I have are inhabited by different species of shrimp...and some fish). Having said that, I do prefer breeding the various wild and wild type species out there. As you may have noticed, there are still very few wild-type shrimp that have established themselves in the hobby, or rather, are offered for sale as captive-bred specimen (very rarely at that). Time to change that with some new husbandry information and healthy supply of wild-types (as opposed to people buying half dead imported shrimp and watching them kick the bucket).

... What are they?

I assume they are the best of the best, so to speak, of crystal reds or whatever.

Are these really worth the $? Looks like they sell for around $30/ea on aquabid. I also see an odd shrimp called the Blue Bolt. Are these gimmicks?

[demonte1997]

That's great info sir. Thank you.

I definitely agree with how far many species have gone with commercial breeding and hybridization. Discus and angelfish are a couple of my favorites in that regard.

[Newjohn]

Designer Shrimp are interesting and with their Intense Solid Black and Red, will stand out in a tank.
With the Price Tag, I will stick with SS / SS+ CRS & CBS for my Designer Shrimp.

I am just wondering what the Next Designer Shrimp will be ?
Seeing that they already have Solid White, Solid Black, Solid Red.
Let us see if they can produce a Solid Red or Black front half w/ Solid White Back Half.

[demonte1997]

Another shrimp that caught my eye was a black with light blue stripes on it. Very striking. I wonder if breeders will make a black with red stripes and how much variation we will see in that regard.

[Mustafa]

Let us see if they can produce a Solid Red or Black front half w/ Solid White Back Half.

That's probably one of the hardest patterns to produce. Just take a look at fish that have been selectively bred for well over a century (and even hundreds of years in the case of goldfish). I am not aware of a single fish that has a selectively bred half-half color pattern. That would look great, though, I agree.

I wonder if breeders will make a black with red stripes and how much variation we will see in that regard.

That, again, will be very hard to do also as the red in CRS seems to be completely recessive to the black...i.e. it "should" not occur together with the black at all. However, we still know very little about genetics, so nothing is impossible. The easiest path to what you are describing is probably through further crossbreeding with closely related species as the whole simple recessive/dominant thing does not work all that well with interspecific crosses.