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What are your thoughts on selective breeding?

FishBeast

Member
Joined
27 May 2009
Messages
264
Location
Australia
I am interested in your thoughts on selective breeding as I am working at breeding a more colourful strain of shrimp that I have sourced from my local river. We do not have a wide variety of shrimp available here in australia and I would like to do my part.

I have a good brood stock of about 30 females and 10 males. My plan is to take out generation 1 and leave generation 2, from which I remove non colourful shrimp. Then keep repeating this process.

My concern is though that by doing this I will end up interbreeding too much in the long term. I am thinking perhaps that after a few generations I can go for another shrimp adventure and source a few (only a few, say 5 female and 5 male) new strains of only the most colourful ones I can find.

Here are some pictures of my breeders.

IMG_7513.jpg

IMG_7512.jpg

IMG_7487.jpg

IMG_7486.jpg

IMG_7505.jpg

A pic of some of the shrimp against a white background as to get an accurate show of their colour.
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Male blue
IMG_7459.jpg

Female Blue, not quite this blue in real life
 
Thanks, I haven't found alot of information about selective breeding of shrimp so I am kind of in the dark. I will do it as you say but about every 5 generations. I figure that it will take a very long time (10-20 generations) to see any difference. LOL just as well I love shrimp!
 
As I understand it, all crystal red shrimp that now exist in the world can trace their ancestors to three (well, two out of three) original shrimp discovered by a collector in a horde of thousands. Because of this, they are extremely delicate. So inbreeding of shrimp in the way you suggest certainly works, the trade-off being the fragility of the future generations. If you cross some unrelated shrimp back in every so often you will definitely improve the strength of the genetic makeup, but it will obviously take longer to get your colour strain.

I'm not sure if you can mention other forums on here, but www.shrimpnow.com would be the place to look for plenty of discussions on this - there's some folk on there that really know their stuff.

Funky shrimp, by the way
 
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