YuccaPatrol wrote: I don't get the impression that many (any?) of us are making an effort to select for the brightest, darkest RCS. This would be a worthwhile effort though, and is something I can imagine doing in the future as another side project.
I've actually been doing this for a while now. The extremely red shrimp that you see on the main page of this website is a product of selective breeding. The picture is not touched up. It's not even an exceptional individual in my breeding group. about 70-80% of female shrimp in my selectively bred group look like that or even darker. When these shrimp carry eggs, you can't even see the eggs through the intensely red carapace. You really have to take a guess at figuring out if the female is ovigerous or not. I usually have to wait until the female swims in mid-water and peek from below.
It's a long, long process process though. It will probably take a few years, before I have a 100% true breeding "super-red" strain of RCS. Plus, you need a lot of tanks for such a project. Every generation one or several ovigerous super-red female needs to be isolated in a separate tank. Since we don't know which males have the super-red gene, it's depends on luck if the females mated with a super-red male or not. However, as your population keeps being selectively bred over several generations the chances of your females mating with super-red males become higher and higher.
I have not been doing the selection very intensively due to lack of space so I am only in my 3rd or 4th generation. Whenever I have space I separate a few ovigerous females to a different tank, effectively starting a new colony. I have also noticed that the males tend to be a slighly more reddish in a population that was selectively bred for super-red.
A note about the green eggs people are reporting in RCS. All green egged females I have seen have been much paler in color than the normal RCS with yellow eggs. So, if you want to breed for color, you don't want to use females that have greenish eggs.
Having said all this, I am more a "wild-type" person when it comes to shrimp (and fish). I like selectively breeding captive-bred populations, but my true passion is to have wild-type shrimp, establish them in the hobby, and leave the selection up to the shrimp. There are so many wild dwarf shrimp species (plus local variations) out there that almost every color is represented in wild species. Once I have more space and time I will make a conscious effort to travel to all the hotspots of shrimp diversity and collect as many species as possible (and there are hundreds plus many undiscovered) for my breeding program before many of them are wiped out forever.
Even with captive-bred color variations of wild shrimp, such as the crystal reds, I enjoy the diversity of coloration and patterning you can see in a population that is left to its own devices. Others might call them "low grade", which implies inferior, but it's really in the eye of the beholder what's inferior and what's superior. For me, diversity is superior. I will still breed "high grade" CRS, but I will always value and enjoy my diverse, "gradeless" population.
