Red Rili Shrimp Sex Identification

[snazy]

The shrimp babies have grown a lot. There are saddled females all over the place. I noticed the adult cherry female is actually berried again. They tend to hide a lot when berried so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some of the younger ones berried too somewhere between the plants. I've kind of left it and it's overgrown now.
The plants are doing great with no ferts or CO2 still which is amazing.

The young shrimp are different markings, some rili looking ones and some completely clear, transparent bodies too, rest all type of cherry colours.

Here is a picture of one of the young females that looks a bit like a rili. There's better ones but this one was handy to picture.

 

[snazy]

I forgot to mention, the sick shrimp for the record is still alive in the other tank and none of the shrimp in the fry tank have any similar symptoms. My partner was admiring how beatufil the lonely shrimp is the other day, what a contrast between the red and white....

I had to explain that the shrimp is sick

 

[Baccus]

Congrats on the bergening development of your rili lines

. If you can just keep the best rili pattern together and remove the non rili, the pattern should just keep getting stronger with each generation.

I can understand people thinking a diseased white bodied shrimp looks pretty

, I see it quite a lot on a shrimp forum that I am on, where people find either a white bodied shrimp in their tanks and think they have some new amazing mutation or catch a couple of wild shrimp with the same problem and again think they have stumbled across something new and amazing.

 

[snazy]

The only place I can put the non-desired shrimp is the tank with the sick shrimp so I am gonna have to delay that arrangement but in a while I will. I can't even imagine catching them one by one at this stage, looks way difficult with all the plants and shrimp and corys inside.I'll probably regret it but at this stage I don't mind too much.It will be interesting what comes out of the next generations.

 

[Baccus]

You could always set a bit of a shrimp trap to get the shrimp without causing massive upheavals in the tank. I often sink one of my suspended breeder nets into the tank and bait it with food I know the particular fish or shrimp can not resist. Then I sit back and wait for the fish/ shrimp I want to climb into the net for a feed, and all I have to do is lift the net and transfer it to where I want.
I have also seen soft drink (soda) bottles that have been cut placing the necks of two bottles into the middle of one of the bottles (the necks act like funnels), then bait and put it in the tank and wait. People often use this technique for bristle noses but my cherry shrimp also happily wonder into such a trap. They are such gluttons for food

.

 

[snazy]

These are very good tips. I have to try the bottle method. I did try a while ago catching some cory "babies" in a net trap because they are too big for my air tubing but none of them went in.

There were a few shrimp exploring it though

The corys now have learned what a fish net is because I had to move quite a few of them to the other tank and imagine that the most I could catch at one attempt were 2-3 at a time after hours trying. I've forgotten how fast corys are. Now when they see the fish net they absolutely go bonkers before I even try. I am gonna have to catch the rest when they are big enough for new homes and I am dreading it

 

[snazy]

It's been over a month and a half since "diagnose" of the sick shrimp and I saw him yesterday still looking fine besides the white stuff. He seems to have all his legs and attributes so it's not causing any other signs.
The shrimp/cory tank is doing great. I've got many berried females, I've lost count I will definately be overrun soon

The colours of some are strange, or should I rather say lack of colour. They are quite a few just transparent, with no colour whatsoever besides the red lines that go along the lenght of the body. It's the same "colour" as the middle of a red rili shrimp for example with that difference that the entire body is the same transparent colour without the head and tail being red.

I'll try to take a picture on of these days but just to show what I mean by transparent it could be compared to the picture below which is not mine of course, and it's not a cherry shrimp but the colour of the shrimp is similar to the cherries ones I have:

 

[Baccus]

I think I know what you mean by the clear/ transparent body of some of the young shrimp. Here are some of my young ones that have cropped up in my rili breeding project.

I didn't have the benefit of starting off with pure rili's only the couple of fluke ones that cropped up by chance in my tanks. But I have seen a couple of these clear ones with very faint red on their backs in faint bars. I saw one of the clear ones the other day and her saddle is also white. I am hoping that I may have the beginnings of Snowball cherrys as well as future better rili's. Time will tell and I will be watching the developments with interest.
My other breeding project is also kicking along with some odd colours turning up in the tank with my chocolate male cherry and couple of dark red females. Some of the offsrping are already mature enough to start showing saddles.
Before winter I will have to get a heater for their little tank (20L) or find another shrimp safe tank that is already cherry shrimp free.

Oh and in a month or so I will be getting two new types of Aussie native shrimp that have just recently been discovered. I can't wait to see what they are like, I have not even seen photos of them.

. And after the mistake of mixing Aussie chameleon shrimp with cherry shrimp (couldn't tell them apart when the chameleons decided to be red

) I don't want to put anything but the natives into the new tank I am currently cycling.

 

[snazy]

Yes, clear just like these. The shrimp are like guppies, any colour can turn up eventually it seems
What happened when you put the chameleon shrimps with the cherries?
It would be lovely to see the new Aussie native shrimp when you get them. Can't wait. Wish we had such opportunities here.

 

[Baccus]

In Australia we seem to be getting all sorts of colour morphs in the cherry shrimp happening out here, it could be because we had such a smaller genetic load of cherry shrimp to start with. Although snowball shrimp where first developed in Germany, I don't see why they can't crop up accidentially in other places too.
The chameleon shrimp didn't do anything bad, it was just that when it came time to remove a heap of cherry shrimp from the tank, I had a great deal of trouble telling who was what because some of the chameloens had decided to blend in with the red cherry's. It made it really hard because I was actually taking the cherry shrimp off to the pet shop, and I really didn't want to send off any of my limited number of chameleons as well.
The only reason I have the opportunity to get my hands on some of our rarer/ newly discovered native shrimp species is becuase I got to know a guy who loves our native shrimp and wants to see more of them kept as pets, especially since we techniqually are not suposed to have any exotic shrimp and the chances of any being allowed in anytime soon is slim. Its rather good that this guy off his own bat is so dedicated to getting our shrimp and other inverts properly classified and recorded because of the way mining etc is happening we could lose species before we even knew we had them. I am more than happy to help keep a resivour of the native shrimp from further north where I am in Central Queensland. In fact that is one of the goals to have reserves of these shrimp species scattered over Australia so if anything should ever happen to the wild populations they are not lost for ever. It worked by accident for a type of rainbow fish only found in one lagoon on Fraser Island. Officials thought the rainbow fish was lost for good, but one person happened to still have some he had collected years ago in his tanks at home.

 

[snazy]

Fishkeeping is beneficial this way. I've read a lot of fish species were preserved by fishkeepers.
 
A picture of one of my rili females. She is berried
 

 
Here are a couple of the clear shrimp:
 

 

[snazy]

Took a poor picture of the lonely sick shrimp today. .He kept walking around so I couldn't get a better one. He looks grown up to me a bit. He is longer. How long do shrimp live normally?It's actually not one month but two months since he went white/sick after looking at my previous posts. If I get too many in the other tank I may move a few females to this one to see what will happen. Problem is the plants in the tank have melted besides the struggling anubias so there isn't much cover at the moment till I fix the problem.
 

 

[Baccus]

Cherry shrimp generally live for 2 years maybe stretched out to 3. There are quite a few illnesses that display a whitenig of the body in shrimp, and one of these illnesses is suspected of being carried by males which then infect females and any offspring the female has. I suspect that the females do carry it too, but it just can not be easily seen though the females generally darker full red body.
 
Nice to know the poor male is still going strong, but I honestly would only look at putting other shrimp in with him if your running out of shrimp room else where.
 
Sorry to be so quick, only just got mobile and internet back on and don't know when the flood waters are going to knock them out again.

 

[snazy]

Thanks. I've looked at the other shrimp and so far I haven't noticed anything. I can't be sure none have it but there are just a few females that are fully red the rest have a bit of a rili patern so I can see the middle and those I've looked at don't have it. The males definately don't. Maybe the only one that had it is the one that died and I got lucky, who knows?

 

[Baccus]

I guess it will be a waiting game, and like so many illnesses they sit in the background, but if the carrier gets stressed then the disease takes hold.
 
I was rearranging a tank yesterday and stumbled across a sole surviving yellow cherry, from a small population I got a while ago. So that this poor shrimp is not on its own any more and so that the gudgeon in the tank doesn't get another shrimp snack I have put the yellow cherry in with my clear/ white (almost snowball) cherries. Not sure what sort of colours or patterns this will bring about. Because the clear shrimp came from some fluke rilis that happened on their own in one of my tanks and came from red stock. But it will be almost as exciting as watching my black cherry shrimp breeding project. Even though my black cherry project got a bit set back thanks to a diasaster in the tank and me losing the black male along with almost all the near adult offspring and the three females that had the young. But its gradually coming good again now and its back to being a waiting game.