I was contacted by a member of the forum a while back wanting to know if I could show some photos of Malaya Shrimp...He had purchased some with the tag "Malaya" and was pretty sure what he got was something else. OK so after discovering to his satisfaction they were in fact not Malaya Shrimp he asked if I would like to have them sight unseen....
I said yes.
This is what came in the mail today.
Now it looks like I only have 2 maybe 3 females and 10 or more males, but not sure yet. At least I am assuming what I have shown are indeed male and female of the same species.
I have searched here and elsewhere without finding anything I could say for sure was it so I am asking here and the closest I saw was the Indian Dwarf Shrimp...
It is the one I thought was a male that is the mystery shrimp and the other I thought to be a female of the same possible species is in fact a different shrimp all together and got into the shipping bag by mistake.... I was informed of this by PM after posting photos.
So it is the small clear shrimp I am trying to ID here and have no clue what they might be. I have now found one showing a saddle forming and will try for a photo later. Wasn't looking closely before being under the incorrect assumption the other female was part of the group I will post a photo if I can get one later.
Ahhhh the learning experience, and I still don't know what either shrimp is.....
OK after getting some suggestions and looking further on line I am agreeing that this is the wild form of Neocaridina heteropoda which is fine and I am glad to add it to my collection!
A very cool shrimp and if you look at Dan's site http://www.theshrimpfarm.com he has a very good photo showing this shrimp.
Hmm, I’m beginning to think the “Chocolate” shrimp I purchased in April are also wild Neocaridina heteropoda. They are all rather plain, being mainly translucent with some slight colour. Had the seller posted photos, I probably would not have purchased them. Oh well, I find myself watching them just as much as my cherries and bumble bees. Here are a few photos.
The first shrimp (top of the page) is a shrimp that comes in "Rainbow shrimp" shipments from India. I don't think it has been identified or maybe even been scientifically described.
Now on to several things that need some urgent clarification here. You guys really need to be careful when talking about Neocaridina species *not* to attach "wild cherry" or "wild N. heteropoda (which is a name not even accepted by the scientific community..see below) to every Neocaridina sp. that is not red, yellow or white but just "brown" or see-through. There are many Neocaridina species out there that look quite similar to each other and unless you are *absolutely* sure (as in scientifically identified the species, or received your shrimp from a verifiably identified colony) that you have a given Neocaridina sp. please do not just call your shrimp "wild cherry". If I can't identify various Neocaridina spp. by picture alone in many cases, there is a good chance that you can't either. Neocaridina spp (= species) freely interbreed, so even if your "brown" shrimp comes from a red cherry shrimp colony, that does not mean that it's the "wild form." It just means that some Neocaridina sp. interbred with your red cherries and now you have a mixed, possibly interspecies hybrid, colony. So, please, just call your "mystery Neocaridina" "Neocaridina sp." until you can verifiably identify your shrimp under a microscope if you have knowledge and the means to do so. Everything else will just spread more confusion and misinformation with people offering Neocaridina hybrids as "wild red cherries" for sale. I have a colony of verifiable Neocaridina denticulata sinensis and I can only say that because I actually caught them myself from the wild in rivers where only N. denticulata sinensis was reported in a scientific paper. So...unless you have similar verification, refrain from guessing that any given Neocaridina is a "wild cherry shrimp."
Also, and this is VERY important, Neocaridina denticulata sinensis has *not* been recognized as N. heteropoda. It is thanks to some trigger-happy German hobbyists, who just couldn't wait to be the first to publicize a "new" name, that this name is in circulation. It has so far only been suggested in ONE paper and there is at least one other scientific paper, which came out *after* the paper suggesting the name change, that did not accept the name change, continued using Neocaridina denticulata for the whole denticulata compless and suggested that several species within this complex, including N. denticulata sinensis, would have to be re-examined and probably re-described/separated from N. denticulata in the future.
So..unless a suggested species name change is accepted by peers in the scientific community, that name change is not valid and just a suggestion. That's how peer-review works. Only trigger-happy hobbyists jump the gun and spread such suggested names just to be the "cool" first ones to spread the news. (Same applies to the name change in the Amano shrimp by the way). So, please, let's not follow in the footsteps of other trigger-happy hobbyists by using non-confirmed names for our shrimp. It's one of the missions of this website to halt the spread of misinformation and only present credible, verifiable, reliable information free from random guessing. Let's keep this mission alive.
It is too bad that is the haste to supply shrimp to the ever growing hobby so many will go miss-labeled or incorrectly identified just to sell them. It is also frustrating for folks new to the hobby that end up with these shrimp when trying to ID them. Now it makes this shrimp no less interesting to me by any means and is there someone that does or can you possibly (or be willing to try) ID a shrimp if sent a couple to keep for your trouble? And if it is still unidentified then what?
I guess what I am asking is this:
I as many here may already know hunt gold nuggets as well as meteorites in the deserts of the Southwestern USA. When a suspected "new" meteorite is found it is as with new shrimp species just another specimen needing classification by professionals. We then send a sample in to one of the Universities that offers this service, donate the specimen to their museum and it is named and classified. I have one named Trilby Wash found in Maricopa Co. AZ.... Do Universities do this sort of thing? Does anyone do actual classifications with new shrimp for the public?
I see more and more of this happening in the future as folks in tropical countries scramble to find "new and exciting" shrimp to feed the hobby... Yes I am also guilty and will collect about any interesting shrimp that catches my eye.
The problem with freshwater shrimp at this point is that there aren't all that many researchers working on them. I have not really done any extensive search on all the researchers and graduate students in the US that may currently be working with freshwater shrimp, but whenever new scientific papers about shrimp come out, they are written by just a handful of people (not in the US). Hence, there is really no easily accessible person/institution here in the US that could identify or describe a new shrimp. Also, describing a new shrimp de novo, i.e. giving it a scientific name for the first time, takes time as a paper needs to be written and published. This can take months (or more). I'm actually toying with the notion to put up a numbering system (just like the "L" numbers for plecos) on my website. This system would provide new (and existing) shrimp that have not been IDed or described yet with a number, such as S-10, S-05, S-135 etc. etc.. We'll see....
Anyway, maybe I can get some researchers in the US interested in freshwater shrimp as I personally don't enjoy the naming/scientifically describing part all that much and would rather have someone else do it who actually enjoys it. Werner (Klotz) from this forum has become very good over the years at identifying shrimp (dead ones sent to him) under the microscope if there is literature for that shrimp available, but he lives in Austria and sending shrimp over the ocean is not a practical solution (plus he has a job *and* Germans/Austrians sending shrimp corpses already). Anyway, as I have said many times before, looking at shrimp under the microscope to identify them is, in my opinion, obsolete and will be replaced for the most part by DNA analysis and comparison. That's really the only sure-fire way to find out how shrimp are related to each other (in addition to crossing experiments of course).
I will post a photo if I can get one later.
