@aotf Thank you!
It took all day to move the tank. I drained some water into a bucket, caught as many shrimp as I could, and then vacuumed the substrate a bit to make sure it wouldn’t kick up gross stuff. I left a little water in there for the tiny shrimplets I couldn’t net.
I made sure to keep the filter media wet and added a bit of baterial starter in case. I’ll go back to the office to check on them today.
I culled extensively when putting the shrimp from the bucket back into the tank. I’ve never culled before, but I did my best to pick the shrimp with the brightest and darkest colors and make sure there were some males in there too. The lower quality blue dreams will come to the tank at home, in the off chance they spit out some bright ones later on (they have those genes).
There were some oddballs I wanted to ask about. I know sometimes the babies seem clear when they’re very young, but there was an adolescent with almost no color. There were also some reddish shrimp, as well as what look like very pale blue bodied red rili. All the “oddballs” were adolescents. I pulled them out and they’re going to go into a five gallon spare tank I have to see what happens with them. My question was, are they colored this way because somehow a red cherry has contaminated the gene pool? I did have one hitchhiking red cherry get into the tank from my house, but I took him out before adding the blue dreams. Or, are they colored like so because of random genetics, and the fact that they don’t breed entirely true?