Neocaridina davidi - wild form… truly wild or just a brownish shrimp? A proposal.

[lingistis]

Neocaridina davidi - wild form… truly wild or just a brownish shrimp?
A proposal.

After reading a lot on Neocaridina davidi (former  heteropoda) and keeping red cherries for many years I have come to believe that we refer to as “wild” our oddly colored brownish shrimps. These dark, brownish or even greenish colored shrimp, at least those that I have, have nothing to do with the truly wild Neocaridina davidi. They are a product, and by some an undesirable outcome, of non-selective breeding of color form Neocaridina davidi. In fact it is largely suggested that you can achieve them easier and fairly fast by cross breeding two different color forms of the species. So then why do we call them “wild form”, “variety wild ”, “wild type” ect. since they are not even close to wild? Truly wild Neocaridina davidi members have large gene pools, surly have traits from their niche, and probably the only thing they may have in common with their selectively breed relatives we have in our aquariums is the brown phenotype.

In my opinion the nomenclature we use is misleading and I strongly believe that the word “wild” should be used, in any form, only for the truly wild Neocaridina.

I propose we replace the wrong usage of the word “wild” with a more adequate one such as e.g.“dark breed” or “brownish”.

 

The above is a proposal I made back in 2013... with feedback from international shrimp keepers like this:

 

"I agree. We could call them "Mixed"?
It could be that all the colored forms of the Neocaridina sp. are due to defective genes for the other missing colors rather than a dominant/recessive based system seen in Caridina sp.
Hence, when we cross different colors of Neos, they complement each other's defective genes and "recovered", although the gene pool would still not be entirely complete."

 

" yeah, I think the word wild should only be used with pure wild shrimp.
if I cross a Sakura yellow and a carbon rili for example I will get mostly wild colour shrimp, maybe a few will look like the mother shrimp. now if I cross any if those shrimp back to their parents about 50% of the babies could have sakura yellow or black rili colour all depending on what colour the mom was.
and if I allow the mixed shrimp to breed together their is a 25% chance of getting the colour of the original mother of the cross.
the offspring shrimp receive their mothers mitochondrial DNA and the fathers donation will either manifest specific traits or mutations or revert them to wild/ dominant trait, but they still have the recessive gene for the sakura yellow or rilli black traits... "

 

"In my opinion, breeding the real N. davidi wild would be interesting because it's the best way to get new colours, like green, blue, or purple.
Their resistance is higher than selected varieties like Yellows or Chocolates.
So, if you want something new, go wild!"

 

" This is my type of discussion, I too dislike wild so I've been using (PT:Wd) for phenotype wild, so for id I log, Sakura Yellow (PT:Wd) and I also log Sakura Yellow (PT:Ri) for rili mutants."

Just to be clear here, we are not talking about a hybrid. A hybrid is a hybrid and it should be referred to using only the genus name.
But in this case we do not have a hybrid which is a crossing of two different species. The “dark” outcome is a true Neocaridina davidi, since the parents are color forms originating or bred for their color from a one time wild population. The color or form or variety addition to the nomenclature is for pointing out the character it was breed for. Some may use fancy names as well.

Thus coming back to the start of this post, why use an addition to the name to point out a misleading characteristic, since the shrimps are not “wild”?

In this case I think that one should at least expand the addition to “wild color form” (w.d.c.) and not just state “wild”.
I would very much like to read your thoughts on this and if you agree with my opinions.

Yiannis (a.k.a. lingistis)