"White color morph" with yellow eggs on state flyer?

[manx]

Hi! I've had opae ula for years with no breeding but this spring, redid my tank, and they're breeding like crazy now I love my shrimp! I'm doing a silly research paper for my community college English class on the complex ways captive breeding vs wild collection can affect aquatic life and using opae ula as an example to illustrate how under-researched many species in the pet trade are.

Poking around, I saw this flyer http://webhome.auburn.edu/~santosr/pdf/ ... 041608.pdf about the different species of shrimp in the anchialine pools, with a "white morph" shrimp. At first I assumed it was just a pale one, but actually, it's got yellow eggs!

The picture is credited to Mike Yamamoto, who looking around was/is a state biologist in Hawaii who has written a book on anchialine pool species. Is this the same yellow as the orange or yellow shrimp Mustafa has bred, just a shrimp who's currently pale? It's just interesting, have never heard of the color variations coming up in wild ones

[Ula Hula]

I don't know, but, wow, that white shrimp with yellow eggs is so cool!

[dglidden]

Looks like an "albino" or "leucistic" form. I don't know much about that trait in shrimp, but in other animals and plants you can get a mutation that prevents the gene for red color generation from working. "Albino" and "leucistic" are different mutations, "albino" meaning a total lack of pigment, where "leucistic" is just the red pigment gene, but they generally result in the same look depending on the animal/plant, that being a lack of the bright red coloration. It's a common thing to breed for in reptiles/snakes (which I have things to say about, but will not digress) and often a looked-for mutation in certain varieties of plants. It's definitely a unique look! In the wild it often results in sub-par competition (the animal is much easier for predators to spot, for example. Plants lacking the red gene are usually as successful as their non-leucistic counterparts, until it comes to flowers, which may result in lower reproductive success. I could go on.... ) but in captivity, as long as you provide the basic needs, it can be a unique and interesting look that you can replicate through generations!

[Mustafa]

Yeah, that one is definitely a mutation. It's not the same mutation as our orange or neon-yellow ones. I isolated a white mutation also, but my white mutation has snow-white eggs, they look like snowballs. I'm in the process of building a colony as we speak.

[dglidden]

Yeah, that one is definitely a mutation. It's not the same mutation as our orange or neon-yellow ones. I isolated a white mutation also, but my white mutation has snow-white eggs, they look like snowballs. I'm in the process of building a colony as we speak.

Holy cow, color me excited! (Pun intended...) Pure white Opae Ula sound awesome! I hope they are hardy enough to develop a good breeding colony.

[Vorteil]

Pure white Opae Ula are common. They aren't rare.

[Vorteil]

My white & yellows.