Redness of the opae ula

[Edwin]

Hi all! Just wondering for those of you who have been breeding generations of opae ula, do they lose its redness the longer they stay in captivity? How are we able to keep them looking deep red and beautiful? Any particular minerals or type of supplements found to be helpful in this aspect?

[Varanus]

The shrimp Mustafa sells are many generations removed from the wild ones, so I don't think there is any evidence they get less red over the generations, the babies mine have had certainly aren't on average any less red than the adults I got from Mustafa. How red they are seems to be an aspect of individual variations, though I can't say if that means if you bred deep red ones with other deep red ones you would get predominantly deep red young (though Mustafa's orange shrimp experiment seems to make this idea a good possibility).

Of course they do get paler when stressed, but some individuals are just naturally pale.

[JennyPenny]

I agree with Varanus.
Once I have a larger population, I will be conducting experiments to see if I can breed darker reds. I was able to purchase some h. rubra from a hobbyist who did not purchase from this site. Hers look just like the ones I bought from Mustafa. I hope to get some from a third or fourth source, but am not interested in purchasing wild caught.