Breeding Bloody Mary.

[Purplepanda]

I'm just trying out breeding Bloody Mary for the first time which seems 'bloody' easy, well kind of.  However it seems that they don't all breed true as about 50% are going to be Bloody Mary colour and the rest probably not, is this the norm ?  Do breeders then weed out the good ones, hence the relatively high cost for neos ?

 

I appreciate it's probably the males that are less colourful and more a drab red, so what do I do here ... select out the good ones to keep the better colour genes or rather wait until I know I can also choose a few good coloured males ?

[shrimpybuisness]

Well it all depends on what you want to do. If you want to sell them or keep them high grade, I would cull them and put them in a separate tank. Or if you just want to start a huge colony and dont care about the quality just let them reproduce. I personally when selling my Red Rilis dont like to give out low grade culls so i just feed the really bad ones to my fish and separate the others.

[Vshrimp]

IME BM shrimplets tend to color up later then the normal neo but to answer your question they dont breed true much. Most BM are red but very little red to them and then you will get some really nice BM. Just have to cull them.

[DETAquarium]

Unfortunately with any Bloody Mary you will need to cull them to get to a coloration your happy with. As said above ultimately it depends if your wanting quality of quantity. I would wait until they are juveniles to decide what shrimp to cull, thats what I did when I kept Fire Red Shrimp.

[Purplepanda]

Ok thanks for this feedback, makes sense. Looking at all the young shrimp now at about a month old, it seems about 40% could potentially be BM, so that deep nice dark red colour which sets them apart from say good red sakura. 30% look pretty drab and the remainder are a quite nice red, but not BM red.

I appreciate they will only go that deep red when older rather than when still juveniles. I would also imagine that I will need to wait a month or two before trying to select good coloured males, as I might end up choosing all females if I do so now.

I would hate to cull so have never done the deed, so face a dilemma ..

[fishlover]

I guess it depends how "Pure" your Bloody Mary is. I have one batch only produce about 60% BM while the other batch produce almostly BM. There may be 10% have lighter red.

On the other hand, I found females have deeper red that males.

Colour will deepen as they grow.

Just keep on culling the ligher colour out and eventually you will have a colony of "breed true" Bloody Mary.

[Vshrimp]

I guess it depends how "Pure" your Bloody Mary is. I have one batch only produce about 60% BM while the other batch produce almostly BM. There may be 10% have lighter red.

On the other hand, I found females have deeper red that males.

Colour will deepen as they grow.

Just keep on culling the ligher colour out and eventually you will have a colony of "breed true" Bloody Mary.

I think its always true for neos. Male vs female color lol