Mixing Various Cardinia Shrimp

[Harry Muscle]

I'm thinking of getting back into keeping shrimp and I noticed that a lot of new cardina varieties are now available (tibee, mischling, king kong, etc). I know with neocardina shrimp if you keep different colors they will basically revert back to a dull brown shrimp. Is there any risk of something like that happening with cardina shrimp or will they always continue to produce interesting patterns and colors when breeding the various colours and varieties together?

 

Thanks,

Harry

[Jayjhis]

It depends on the caridina really.  They aren't like neos, they probably won't just make wilds, but the results of crosses aren't necessarily going to be interesting.  Mischlings for example are shrimp with parents that are different but they look like one of the parents and carry recessive genes from the other - so about 25% of their offspring will look like he recessive parent when they're bred with other mischlings.

 

A lot of crosses give kinda disappointing results at first and it takes a lot of culling over several generations to get anything really cool.  Like you might just get what looks like a really low grade version of one of the  parents.

 

But, a lot of interesting things can randomly show up too.  Especially if you can set up more than one tank and exert some control over who is mating with who.

[Shrimp Life]

I would recommend keeping different patterns of taiwan bees together or different patterns of pintos together for your tank to have diversity in pattern but not in quality/poor color.