Red Rili Shrimp Sex Identification

[snazy]

Hi Baccus. You may enjoy this video of my fortkail rainbows below. They have grown up gorgeous but are still not the size of the adults I saw in the shop.
In the same shop they are selling now wild caught Pseudomugil ivantsoffi. Do you know anything about them? Can I keep them together with the Pseudomugil furcatus or there is a chance of interbreeding? There isn't much info out there about the ivantsoffi species.
 

 

[Baccus]

Very nice. As tempting as it would be to keep various psuedomugil species together I would probably advise against it, there is a strong likely hood of them cross breeding. True the abilty to actually raise the fry of many blue eye fish is a skill, there is always the risk that some chance offspring could survive. I know its strongly advisable to not keep many of the different strains of Australian Rainbow fish together because loosely they are all the same fish but every creek system has its own unique variety.
 
You might have already read these couple of pages on Blue Eyes but in case you haven't here are a couple of helpful links.
http/rainbowfish.angfaqld.org.au/ivantsoffi.htm
 
AND
 
http/rainbowfish.angfaqld.org.au/Furcatus.htm

 

[snazy]

Thanks Baccus. That's what I needed. I knew I can rely on you


I'll give it a skip. They are also too small. I'll stick with the furcatus only then. Not that I don't have another tank to put them and I am not willing to have them but I've had enough of hybrids(I've got corys that hybridized without me knowing they would)

 

[Baccus]

No worries, always happy to try and help.
 
Which corys hybridised? Thankfully none of mine have actually managed to, even though the brochis spendens have had a good try at breeding with the peppered corys. And this morning my false julii where trying to breed and a young male peppered was getting interested in them.
 
Good news on the shrimp front for me. Not only are my rili shrimp growing up nicely and really starting to show their red heads and tails, but a huge plus for me is my native Blackmore river shrimp didn't all die.
Below size when first born

 
I had thought the hydra that had invested the tank had all killed the shrimplets or that the filter had sucked them all up. But today I finally saw a couple of the babies looking like mini adults at only appox 3mm long. Thankfully it appears my spotted Blue Eyes also didn't eat the shrimplets.

 

[snazy]

That's very good news. Hydra sounds horrible. I read about it once.
 

Which corys hybridised?

 
My albino aeneus and my gold lasers. The male gold lasers have taken a liking into my female albinos, although they have their own opposite sex if they decided to be racists. They must be fairly closely related but because of the incident(that goes on on regular basis), I read a lot about corys and aparently it isn't at all impossible, even between not very closely related species.
 
Here is an old video I took:
 
http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM2cy_qufJ8
 
And here are the kids:
 
http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPuIF874JKo

 

[Baccus]

I seem to recall reading some where that laser gold stripes where still in the aeneus genus, its just that the gold stripes are a certain variety. So in a way they wheren't really out breeding, just breeding with a different colour variant. Still not exactly desirable, and frustrating if they have members of the opposite sex that are in the same colour morph as them.

 

[snazy]

Oh, yes, possibly they are very closely related, if not the same species altoghether. The gold lasers are still not fully identified where they belong. And yes, they've got their own females/males so no reason for hybirdizing but it seems they make no difference between themselves.
However, it turns out hybridizing happens to other not so closely related ones. Look at this one below. This is a cross between a sterbai and metae(not mine thankfully). I was reading a comment by Ian Fuller saying that most corys coming out of the big Asian farms are hybrids.
 

 
 
Talking about corys, look what I saved the other day from my sterbais just out of nothing better to do. The platies ate the rest but I managed to grab two eggs. See those two moons above the shrimp stuck on the glass

 

 

[Baccus]

The cross between the strebai and matae is quite a nice little cory, I wonder if it is more forgiving in temperature ranges since strebia usually like warmer water. I think crosses in your own tank are ok, the trouble arises later when offspring from cross bred fish are released onto an unsuspecting market.
Its like in Australia blue capped cordon bleu finches where hard to get so quite a few less honest people sold female red checked cordon blues with male blue capped, it made for a horrible mess for later people trying to keep lines pure, and now blue capped cordon bleus are pretty much extinct in Australia.
 
Good save on the cory eggs, I can't wait for my current cory fry to grow up enough to tell which breed they are. The false julii are looking nice and plump and I have seen them doing spawning behaviour, as well as the emeralds. Since the eggs where so tiny I am hoping the dwarfs finally bred since they are hard to get and I wouldn't mind having a few more of them.
 
And more good news on my native Blackmore River shrimp, I saw even more half grown babies getting about in the tank, so it looks like I might end up with a viable community of them. Next month I am going up North and will be getting yet more native shrimp and snails to add to my collections. Its just a shame that quite a few of our native shrimp are hard to raise the babies because they have larval stages and often require brackish water fo some of their development. While other native shrimp can breed in pure fresh but have very exacting water requirements.

 

[snazy]

That's the good part about it, the challenge of raising and looking after them. It's very rewarding if one manages
I was wondering, did you ever had any issues with a disease or something transferring from the wild ones for example? Or these are just myths considering each tank is full of pathogens already anyway?

 

[Baccus]

The only problems I have had from wild shrimp has been leeches, but those I fixed by giving the shrimp a salt water bath, I would not recommend this unless you know the shrimp being treated can or should tolerate some salt for a limited amount of time. Other wise the only problem has been native shrimp from pristine waterways having no heredity defences against some of the more common shrimp illnesses that can be found in more commonly kept shrimp like cherry shrimp.
 
There is very real risks of disease entering a tank from wild caught creatures even wild plants, that is why it is always a good idea to have a separate quarantine tank for any aquatic animals or plants taken from the wild. But its fair to also keep in mind that there is a real threat to local environments of diseases and pests even weeds escaping from our tanks and into local waterways. That's is why when I go shrimping (collecting wild shrimp) I use nets that are not used in my tanks, nor do my tank nets go into the local creeks.
 
Speaking of difficult to raise shrimp offspring I am thinking that some how a couple of my typhus shrimp larva have survived the guppy hordes since I am sure I have been seeing more male typhus shrimp in the tank that houses them. Typhus shrimp are interesting aside from their patterns in that they all start off male and once they reach 4cm or so they turn into females. I wont know for certain until I dismantle the tank again and locate all the typhus and do a complete head count. They are also sneaky because they tend to hide in a large hollow log and if your not careful will run out of the log while you are moving it outside of the tank. Yes they really do run, most shrimp will just flip around when out of water but typhus shrimp take off like grey hounds.

 

[snazy]

He, he, like grey hounds

 

[snazy]

I thought I'll snap a few pictures of my shrimp overloded tank. These are just a small portion of them. They love gathering at the surface when I put food because the leaves catch the cory pellets that don't sink instantly.
 

And on this picture, I only saw it afterwards when looking at the snaps, but notice a "black" looking shrimp on the bottom leaf, on it's edge, to the right of the picture

 

 

[Baccus]

Very nice it looks like you have a blue gene cherry

 . If you can I would isolate it and try to find any similar ones or at least ones around the same age/ size that could have come from that batch of offspring and line breed them. A true blue cherry that holds its blue is one of the holey grails of shrimp keeping.
I have been seeing some very nice green cherry shrimp being produced too and they look equally amazing.
 
On the rili shrimp front in my tanks I am at the point of having to divide them and cull the lesser desired of the rili's. Later this evening I have to put in a new filter (after lastnights debarcle of a 3 1/2 hour outage from midnight till 3:30am, and only one filter not self starting again I don't want to risk it when I am away in a couple of weeks time), I figure its the perfect time to also sort some of the cherry shrimp out as well as try and locate more of the baby Blackmore River shrimp. Also good news my local shop that takes my cherry shrimp, guppies, endlers and bristle noses is interested in getting rili shrimp off me and possibly the Blackmores as well. Now I just need to work out how to breed some of my native snails and I should be able to supply some really unusual critters for their shop.

 

[snazy]

3 1/2 hours with no electricity? That must have been fun.

I don't have room for the blue/black rili. I need to find it first though.
Congratulations on the shop, that's really nice. You never know, you may turn it into profession

 

[snazy]

Shrimp are such hitchhikers. I was just shaking some moss in the betta tank because the food got stuck in there and I saw a shrimp falling off it. I put that moss ages ago. I was very careful when removing it from the shrimp tank and it stayed on a napkin wet outside the tank, removed string by string observing each one, then rolled it on a piece of driftwood and dropped it in the betta tank, and I still managed to move a shrimp. Poor thing 

It's still a juvenile so it must have been tiny when I moved the moss..