Non Striped Indian Zebra

[adimeatatime]

I have been keeping these shrimp now for several months now. Since these were wild caught I decided to wait and see if I would have any shrimplets born and then survive. The good news is there are a number of shrimplets now in this tank. They are growing and active. Here is a picture of one of the original adults I bought.

Non Striped Indian Zebra

Unstriped06.JPG (62.81 KiB) Viewed 1466 times

[Neonshrimp]

Great news and thanks for sharing:D We need to get more of these nice looking shrimp out into the hobby!

[adimeatatime]

Thanks!! I agree they are very pretty shrimp. Do you know if the babies will be a combination of striped/non striped? None of mine are big enough yet to be able to tell.

Great news and thanks for sharing:D We need to get more of these nice looking shrimp out into the hobby!

[Mustafa]

If there were no striped animals among the parents, then the offspring won't have stripes either. That's been my experience. Even the non-striped animals are absolutely great looking animals when the juveniles fully color out. It takes a very long time until they color out, though. Until then you can actually see some very faint stripes on the juveniles. On the Indian zebra shrimp juvies the stripes are very dark and pronounced (can't miss them). I'll put up a species description for these two closely related varieties with a bunch of pictures of adults and juveniles soon so the differences become visually apparent.

[adimeatatime]

Thanks for the info Mustafa. I have both striped and non striped, but the babies are the non striped shrimp. I think they are very attractive shrimp too. It seems they are all my favorites.

I'm glad you have an Indian Zebra description with pictures you are working on adding to your shrimp descriptions pages. That will be a really helpful reference.

[Mustafa]

Oh I see. I have a colony of the "brown" shrimp and they never throw any striped animals. However, the ancestors of my current indian zebra shrimp colony had offspring that were both striped and non-striped (=brown(ish)). I separated out the striped ones from the non-striped ones and I have both colonies going now. I don't mix any of the non-striped animals that are the offspring of the striped ancestors with my other "brown"/non-striped colony. I'd like to see if there will be any differences at all going forward between the two non-striped colonies. For now, both colonies seem to look just about the same.

It seems like the striped animals that I separated out are breeding true, but I'll withhold further judgement until a few generations from now. Why the striped ancestors of my shrimp did not have just striped offspring is up in the air. As is almost always the case I was only able to get females (no males in the shipment) that happened to be carrying eggs. It could of course be that these females mated with non-striped males either in their natural habitats or in holding tanks in their country of origin. In other words, it's still unclear if the striped and the non-striped varieties occur in the same habitats as an interbreeding population or not. Nothing short of a trip to their habitats will clarify this.

[adimeatatime]

Well, it looks like some of the shrimp that were supposed to be striped are non-striped. The seller must have a mixed colony and only pictured the striped shrimp. There are a few of the striped shrimp though that I will separate and try to get a striped colony going.

It would be very interesting to be able to go check out the locations our shrimp come from. It's unfortunate the people doing the collecting won't do any documentation. Or the people receiving them. I guess they must receive to many different types of animals to be able to take the time.

I will report back when/if I can get these shrimp going.

[adimeatatime]

I now have shrimplets in my Non striped Indian Zebra tank. They are about one month old now and seem to be doing very well. It's is really exciting to see them come out for food or see them picking on the side of the tank.