zwergkrebszuechter wrote:
Blue pearl shrimp are not bred from white snowball shrimp. You can easily see that because they have brown eggs, no white eggs like snowball shrimp.
Hmm...interesting. I did have some bluish shrimp with brown eggs that I separated from my "neon" shrimp, who also have brown eggs. I bred them both from the wild snowballs. Here is a link to some of the pictures I made a while ago:
viewtopic.php?p=11899&highlight=orange+ ... neon#11899
I have a picture of the bluish shrimp somewhere, too, but I'll have to dig it out. Unfortunately, it died on me, but I'm sure that my "neon" shrimp will throw some blues at some point again. I bet you that they are probably the same variation as the blues you probably received from Ulf Gottschalk. I just never put much importance in them, because the blue is not all that intensive as you can see in the pictures posted above. When I imagine a really blue shrimp I'm thinking about something that's as blue as a blue crayfish or my "blue" shrimp's first generation ancestors (see shrimp varieties pages).
The strange thing is that Ulf's original animals seem to have white eggs as you can see in his pictures above. Did you get your animals from him originally?
Somehow he managed to get rid of the brown pigmentation and leave only the blue. Maybe by breeding with snowball shrimp, I do not know.
I don't think he bred them out of snowball shrimp. My blues came out of a "neon" orange mother.
Wild snowball shrimp are very variable in color. They can show like any color of a rainbow.
Actually, mine aren't variable. They all show the greyish color. Once in a while you seem some other color morphs (like my orange neon shrimp) but that's about it. I think their natural coloration is just greyish. They do seem to produce color morphs quite often though.
As someone mentioned those reddish wild snowball shrimp here, I started selecting for those, recently. As they appear more commonly in some tanks than in others I think it is genetic and can be bred for a pure strain. Its not a bright red, like red cherry shrimp, but a brownish, pinkish red. But still nice.
As I've said before, I'm very suspicious of reddish Neocaridina that are *not* red cherry shrimp. The red cherry shrimp is so common that almost everyone who breeds other Neocaridina varieties also has some red cherry shrimp. And I know for a fact that some people in Germany were keeping the two species (wild snowball and red cherry) together because they thought they cannot interbreed. So the chances of *most* reds that you find in a wild type Neocaridina population being hybrids with red cherries are pretty high, especially if the reds start carrying yellow eggs. I'm not saying that other Neocaridina cannot throw true-red non-hybrid mutations, but it should be very, very rare. Only if we are absolutely sure that these red mutations cannot come from "contaminated" populations can we really say that they true mutations of a given Neocaridina species (such as N. cf. zhangjiajiensis). Do your reds have yellow eggs? Hybrid reds don't necessarily have to have yellow eggs, as I have intraspecies hybrids between the wild form of N. denticulata sinensis and red cherry shrimp, which are reddish and have green eggs, but yellow eggs make it highly likely that you have hybrids. The possibility of hybrids is especially high if your population keeps throwing a relatively large amount of reds. True mutations are very rare and if they do occur it usualy occurs in one animal only, which then has to be selectively bred. If you receive a population of wild type Neocaridina and they start throwing multiple reds, then they have almost certainly been crossbred with red animals before.
In fact there are at least 3 blue dwarf shrimp species know that do breed true.
That's not true. See below.
Blue tiger shrimp
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They are not true breeding according to people who've had them for a while, including Gerd Voss. I have also seen them at Gerd's house and only very few are actually truly blue. I have yet to see a true-breeding population anywhere. Their genetics don't seem to be allt hat simple and it's highly likely that there are multiple genes responsible for the blue coloration in some of the individuals, so I don't expect to see all-blue, true-breeding tiger shrimp anytime soon.
blue "Tüpfel" shrimp
Christian Splettstößer, who was the one who first found these animals in a petstore and started breeding them, told me that he only has very few of them left (most died on him) and that he gave about 5 animals to a another guy, who seems to have bred some offspring. Plus, he says that the blue is very different in every animal and extremely faint in many of them. Probably some selective breeding would have to be done to select for animals with more intense blue. Let's just hope that this population survives at all considering that there are only very few animals left.
and blue pearl shrimp.
These are the "blue" wild snowball shrimp. According to Christian, who talked to Ulf Gottschalf (who first bred the blues), most of the animals are not really blue, but have a faint blue hue. I can confirm that, as the blues that came out of my wild snowball shrimp population had more of a blue hue than a strong blue coloration. The animals in the pictures above are probably the bluest animals in his tank...not representative of the average animal in his population. Gerd Voss, who has also seen these shrimp, says the same thing...it's a blue hue in most individuals. Maybe further selective breeding can intensify the blue. It would be great to have a truly bright blue shrimp that breeds true.
Because of the reasons above, I wrote in the species description of the "blue" shrimp that there are no true-breeding blue shrimp in the hobby right now. Yes, there are some people, including myself, who are trying to isolate a true breeding *really* blue population, but we're not there yet. Plus a few animals here and there does not qualify them as being "in the hobby" yet in a sense that they are widely available...they are not.
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), but that's not the point. 
Thanks for the pictures. 
Wow, thanks for sharing the photos with us. Sorry to hear about the shrimp loss. I hope you are able to establish your orange colony again, they are wonderful looking.
