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cherry shrimp and UV

22K views 46 replies 16 participants last post by  united natures 
#1 ·
has anyone exposed their cherry shrimp to high levels of UV? I ask because I have a tank with cherry shrimp on which I put some high UV producing lights. no, I don't know the exact amount and intensity of the UV, but I do know it has UV since It elicits the alexandrite affect quite well.

anyway, the shrimp have colored up quite a bit in the last month. it makes sense that the shrimp would produce more pigment in response to the UV, but I don't want to miss the Forrest fort the trees so to speak, so I'm asking for the experience of others. has anyone else tried this?
 
#2 ·
I don't think anyone has actually shone a UV light directly into the aquarium containing fish/shrimp before...

Some people run a UV light inline to kill parasites, free floating algae, etc and this has no harm on shrimp.

Also, from what I have gathered, the Alexandrite effect is due to visible light, not UV light.
 
#3 · (Edited)
well, my synthetic alexandrite fluoresces under UV in a color it never shows without, so my lights produce UV. i can get a few other things to fluoresce as well. as for the color change, i double checked and your right. i read something different a while ago, but it wasn't from anything authoritative.

i really meant fluorescence, but my brain wasnt working very well and i just happened to be holding a piece of synthetic alexandrite...

anyway, i was just curious. i guess what i need to do now is find someone who has been breeding shrimp, trade for or buy their less colorful ones, and send them back to them later to see how their culls rank in comparison to their choice breeders. it would be cool if this works well.

i guess i should also set up a control tank...
 
#25 ·
i guess what i need to do now is find someone who has been breeding shrimp, trade for or buy their less colorful ones, and send them back to them later to see how their culls rank in comparison to their choice breeders.
back to this point, even if the hypothetical UV light caused an increase in red color it is very unlikely that a genetic trait for an increase in color would be immediately transferred to the next generation or even in the next ten generations. what could be transferred is a trait for receptivity to UV light that then induces a change in color but whether that trait would then be dominant is another unknown.
 
#4 ·
I know a few people that have heard from Asian breeders who use UV bulbs, like the reptile style that give UVA/B over their shrimp tanks claiming it helps the shells or something. As with anything in the shrimp hobby, there is someone doing whatever you can think of, some claiming it works, some saying, no you have to do it this way because so and so does.

In the end, it's not going to hurt them in anyway and may or may not help with any benefits to the shrimp. I would say probably not though, as most UV bulbs don't penetrate the water beyond the first few inches. This I know from tests I've seen people do when I was keeping turtles and testing things like that for UVB bulbs and basically saying they have to be over the dry/basking area or else their useless to the turtle under water past the first couple of inches.
 
#6 ·
Long exposure to Uv light isn't good. It's needed by our bodies for Vitamin production, specifically Vitamin D and has many benefits to the human body. In 10 hours of sunlight you will burn. In 20 minutes, your body has already started making Vitamin D, so I disagree with your statement.

Your analogy is like saying bleach is bad because if you drink 5 gallons of it, you will probably die. Yet in small does in our water, chlorine is one of the single biggest thing that has saved lives by stopping water born bacteria from killing us off. One screw up of not managing enough chlorine in the water caused 7 people to die and 2500 to get sick from e.coli in Walkerton, ON about 10 years back.
 
#7 ·
i will admit, i do not believe that the UV is GOOD for my shrimp, and could possibly harm them in the long run. im too much of a curious bastard to not try it though. once i get a "what if" question in my head, im compulsive about answering it.

UV can be completely blocked within the first few centimeters of water or it can penetrate many meters into the water. it all depends on what you have in the water that can reflect or absorb it. if you have dark stained water rich in tannins, forget about getting UV into your tank. if you only have dissolved salts though, you can probably get UV to penetrate deep.

the bottom of my tank still makes fluorescent objects light up, so im pretty sure the UV is reaching the bottom of the tank. even if it didnt, a lot of my shrimp spend a lot of time up near the surface anyway.

it may make no difference, but who knows? we wont discover new ideas without trying new things. ill have to play it out and see.

i can tell you this though, i had a group of fifteen amano shrimp in another tank for a couple months that never showed any color, but after a couple weeks in the UV tank, they are showing color and patterns. i need to set up a control before i can say that it is the UV that caused it. dont want to get ahead of myself.
 
#8 ·
In nature they would get full natural UV, way more than anything a bulb puts outs and it doesn't effect them. What type of UV are you using? You haven't specified that, as that would help determine how much it is penetrating.

Also, they may look brighter or more colorful under the UV light but have you turned the UV off to see if the color changes you are seeing are the actual shrimp or just the color of the visible part of the bulb.

If I have a tank of clear ghost shrimp and use blue and antic lights and they will look like purple or blue shrimp but doesn't change the fact they are clear.
 
#9 ·
i moved one of the mediocre shrimp out and this is what it looked like. it was mostly transparent a little over a month ago... wish i had the first pic for comparison...
this was taken in the UV tank.


they actually look brighter in my other tanks. all the blue kinda leaves them looking washed out in the UV tank.
 
#13 ·
i wouldnt say i have an experiment going... yet. it doesnt qualify as an experiment, just a casual observation. when i split one tank down the middle with a divider that blocks light, and set up two different kinds of light on it... then we can start calling it an experiment. :)

ill try and get a pic of some of the younger ones. the person who sent me these shrimp was showing off one of her more colorful ones and it doesnt look as bright or solid as this one. she was surprised at how mine look. it could just as easily be the food though.
 
#14 ·
What kind of UV light are you using?

Experiments are hard like this, because you can take two babies from the same parents and one will look awesome and one turn out like crap and that's just genetics and the reason we cull so much, so it would hard to attribute it to the light.
 
#15 ·
i cant remember the brand of the light strip, but the bulbs are 3 seaworld t5ho 12000k and 3 seaworld t5ho actinics. i dont have a clue how those lights rank against other brands, i just know they produce some nice UV. i could go with better known lights, but i like testing new things and im getting a par meter soon enough, so ill be able to find out how they are with par. in the meantime, my wife just tracked the company down. they are based in

this whole tank is testing new stuff, new ideas, new way of doing things.

but don't worry, if i set up a tank to test this idea, it will be set up as a true experiment. identical growing conditions save for the type of light. they will even share the same water and will just be separated.
 
#17 ·
no, it is 3 48" 12000k T5HO and 3 48" actinic T5HO. total of 6 T5HO bulbs, 54 watts each, for a total of 324 watts.

i guess strip is the wrong word to use...


just found the company, based in china. i have a linguist friend who speaks chinese, so i should be able to get a letter sent out to them, or at least read whatever they have published about their products.

still not sure of a brand name though.
 
#18 · (Edited)
and all the bulbs are UV or do you just think they are UV because they make stuff glow under them? That's the actinic lights and while are UV, they are UVA which is really just visible light for the most part. True UVB,is what sunburns us and is invisible.

I think maybe you're confusing the blue/glowing color your lights put off as UV.
 
#19 ·
no, just three. the three actinics produce a lot of UV. they make things fluoresce quite well. the 12000k bulbs barely elicit a response, but the actinics are definitely producing a lot of UV. most fluorescent bulbs do produce UV, just in varying amounts.

think about black lights. those are usually just normal bulbs with a coating in them to block out visible light. plant lights are often set up to NOT produce UV. reef lights though... plenty of fluorescent things to light up.

if you can see things fluoresce even with plenty of normal visible light, then there is a lot more UV than you would get from a black light. i don't think these lights would be useful for growing plants, but its useful for a specific test i wanted to do.

more on that test later. if i have what i think i have, its gonna be a real shocker. im not ready to reveal it yet.
 
#20 ·
here is another one of the shrimp. i started with 20 total about a month ago, with two adults and the the rest juveniles. the adults weren't even close to what they are now. is this a normal color for a typical cherry shrimp? there are a couple in there(probably the starter adults) that are a little brighter than this, but its a pain to hunt them down in a 55g. i have been feeding them mostly algae wafers and the occasional green bean.

i first need to establish that these are in fact well colored for a cherry shrimp before i start looking for a why. don't want to waste time looking for a cause to an affect that doesn't exist...


 
#23 ·
Looks like a cherry shrimp that colored up a bit and I really doubt it has anything to do with the actinics lights. More than likely what you bought as cherry shrimp, were someones PFR culls, and they have decent genetics. Lets face it, not many people breed cherries anymore, they breed PFR and sell off the culls cheaper as cherries.

I think you're still confusing the UV that a actinic bulb puts out as something that it's not. Yes it make stuff glow a bit, as does a black light. Neither of these will give you a suntan, ever. They are not the same type of UV. There is 3 types of UV that all have different effects. UV-A, is visible like black lights and makes stuff glow pretty. That's about it. UV-B gives us suntans and sunburns and stimulates Vitamin D production in humans, and calcium uptake in reptiles and other creatures and is invisible. UV-C kills bacteria and is used in UV sterilizers for aquariums and medical equipment and is invisible.

Yes actinics are used in reef tanks by some, and some despise them because they make all corals glow pretty, even crappy ones where as a nice, good quality coral will be colorful under regular light.

Cherry/fire red/pfr/whatever shrimp, get darker red as they age, regardless of the light. If you are trying to attribute the light to making your shrimp redder, I think you're on the wrong path. They get red as they get older, happens to all of them. I have several times culled too early, only to pull the culled shrimp back into the main tank because 3 months after I culled them, they turned a nice dark or solid red and they weren't that color when I put them in. It was just time they needed, not anything else.
 
#26 ·
hmmm... I have the question stuck in my head. ill have to make a setup using tanning bulbs(UV-A). then I can find out for sure. gotta find some lousy cherry shrimps.
 
#28 ·
I could also offer a trade. I would specifically go for shrimp with the least amount of color, since they would be the ones that show the most response to UV, if they show one at all. if I have shrimp that are naturally super red, its going to be hard to tell if my the tanning bulbs would make a difference. then again, a controlled experiment may still show a difference...
 
#29 ·
OK, so now that I have decided that I definitely want to do this experiment, I need to put a light together that produces almost entirely UV. I have decided that I want to use Tanning bulbs because I can get some that produce almost nothing but UV-A, which is enough to cause humans to tan but wont normally burn them. I imagine if shrimps can "tan" then these bulbs should work. the problem is, I have no idea how to put a lamp together to run the bulbs. can anyone refer me to a guide or instructional that explains how to build lights? as far as I know, there aren't any lights that are set up to run tanning bulbs that would be suitable for an aquarium.
 
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