help me make sense of this persons breeding success

[russrafajko]

let me start by saying I am very new to the shrimp hobby and have had very small success with breeding shrimp. but I work at a local fish store, and a lady came in today looking to donate 6 gallon size zip lock bags of java moss. she said it was just half of what she had and she needed to get rid of it because it was growing too fast. she also commented on how fast her shrimp were breeding. she told me she had green jades, blue dreams, cherries, yellows and oranges in different "grades"  all breeding in the same 90 gallon tank with gold fish. I asked her what the babies look like (assuming they would be cross breeding and breeding out the color) and she told me they were breeding pure and she has around 5000 total shrimp. I asked her how long she had been breeding that group and she said that the tank has only been set up for about a year, and she started with 4 shrimp. I immediately asked her what she was doing special with her tank to make her shrimp breed that quickly, but she refused to tell me, saying it was a secret. All i could get out of her is that she uses a human grade water filter that has carbon ceramic and silver to ionize the water. do you guys think shes full of it? or is there some magic way to get shrimp to reproduce that quickly that I haven't caught on to yet.

[Vshrimp]

let me start by saying I am very new to the shrimp hobby and have had very small success with breeding shrimp. but I work at a local fish store, and a lady came in today looking to donate 6 gallon size zip lock bags of java moss. she said it was just half of what she had and she needed to get rid of it because it was growing too fast. she also commented on how fast her shrimp were breeding. she told me she had green jades, blue dreams, cherries, yellows and oranges in different "grades"  all breeding in the same 90 gallon tank with gold fish. I asked her what the babies look like (assuming they would be cross breeding and breeding out the color) and she told me they were breeding pure and she has around 5000 total shrimp. I asked her how long she had been breeding that group and she said that the tank has only been set up for about a year, and she started with 4 shrimp. I immediately asked her what she was doing special with her tank to make her shrimp breed that quickly, but she refused to tell me, saying it was a secret. All i could get out of her is that she uses a human grade water filter that has carbon ceramic and silver to ionize the water. do you guys think shes full of it? or is there some magic way to get shrimp to reproduce that quickly that I haven't caught on to yet.

I don't believe it. Gold fish would decimate all the shrimps

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

[jessaweeshrimp]

Full of 💩 

[wyzazz]

Hahaha, that's rich!  

[pucksr]

1) She would have all kinds of different "grades". Why? Because she would be rapidly pushing her shrimp population back to "wild-type".   
 

2) The idea that they bred "true" isn't totally surprising. The colors you mentioned are NOT going to immediately breed out in 1 generation. Neos are different colors because they have a few pigmentation dots of different colors which can express in different intensities to create the entire rainbow(think of how your TV creates all of the colors from 3 colors).  
If memory serves, the 3 colors on neo shrimp are red, yellow, blue(primary colors). If she started with an all-blue shrimp, an all-yellow shrimp, and an all-red shrimp, then they wouldn't necessarily turn wild RIGHT AWAY.
In the first generation, she would get some reds, oranges/browns, blues, etc. It would be a lot like crossing sheep.
Sheep cross-breeding experiments
In the first few generations, everything will look fine. Maybe you will get a neat orange.
In 2-3 years? The dominant genes will take over. You will have "wild-type" shrimp. The mostly look brown.

 

So, she might not be lying. However, goldfish are a carp. Carp actually do eat shrimp. However, if she has that much moss, maybe they were hiding successfully? I don't know.
She also may have added the goldfish very recently. As they would most likely eaten the younger shrimp, she wouldn't notice the decline in population right away.

As far as the shrimp breeding? We all know it can happen, I just wouldn't take any shrimp from her(as they won't breed true) and I know for a fact that her shrimp will all be wild-type in 4 years.

[Riaan S]

From 4 Shrimp to 5000 in one year sounds excessive

[GoneCrazy]

Were there any shrimp in the moss she brought? There kind of would have been had there been that many shrimp as you can’t possibly get them all out. 

[Crackhead Johny]

she started with 4 shrimp.

 

green jades, blue dreams, cherries, yellows and oranges  = 5

 

They were breeding pure > Ummm... Asexual reproduction?

 

with gold fish. > I usually recommend Mekong/wels/blue channel cats or Goliath tigerfish for my shrimp breeding tanks/kiddie pools. 

 

is there some magic way to get shrimp to reproduce that quickly that I haven't caught on to yet... well as the tank next to me is currently exploding with yellows I recommend removing the power filter and replacing it with cheap foam.. apparently my old filter ate all the babies even with super dense prefilter.

 

I think she is telling stories or not paying real close attention to her tank.

[edwin_the_elder]

On 6/5/2018 at 2:32 PM, Riaan S said:

From 4 Shrimp to 5000 in one year sounds excessive

Talk about exponential growth