[Eldachleich]

So I got 3 orders of blue pearl shrimp from 3 different sources a while ago. Got some great blue ones in the batches.. and some clear ones. Put them all in my tank and started to watch them grow up. Over time Some of them turned amber, some turned snowball. But one order turned brown. And I do mean brown brown. I started to separate them by colour and drop them into other community tanks according to color, partly to achieve a nice blue in my main tank, and partly to see what would happen. The ambers stayed amber, except now they are are turning a weird pumpkin orange. Like bright, inside guts of a pumpkin, orange. They have some tiny spots of amber colour, but with each generation they get more and more orange and more solid. The snowballs stayed snowball. All of them throw out blue babies occasionally.
I took a good look at the brown shrimp that got sent to me a while ago this morning. When they were first added to that tank all of them were a mottled brown colour. But of the 5 in there, 3 of them have changed drastically. One of them is a pure chocolate brown. No spots or discoloration. Just straight Hershey's colour. The other one is pure chocolate brown on top, and bright bright blue on the bottom. The dividing line between the colours is perfectly straight and even, and directly in the center. And the last one is black. I do mean black... Like black black black. It might have one or two small spots of the chocolate brown colour on it. But for the most part its pitch black.
I'm not too concerned about it since they are all separated, but I am really interested in whats the heck is happening with my shrimp. Google yielded nothing.. Any ideas?

 

[GeToChKn]

Some pics would be cool, and it seems you're just getting a weird variety of colors, especially with 3 different batches of pearls, could have a wide variety of genes. Since they can throw out so many colors, you never really know what they were crossed with, what F generation they are, etc. You get some that are blue but are F1 cross with a blue and an amber, they are going to have some of both genes and then mix those with the genes from the others ones. They seem a lot harder to work with, maybe I'll stay away form the blue pearls, lots of people recently have been posting color issues with them and seems like a lot of culling and work to get them to stay blue and keep only the purest genes.

 

[james0816]

For those colors...I would be willing to say the lines were crossed somewhere. Bout the only thing I can think of. Interesting.

 

[Eldachleich]

I figured they got mixed at some point... they had to have to produced this.... Im trying to take pics but my cellphone is proving pretty useless in this endeavor... I keep getting blurry patches of shrimp shaped colour... I dont have firm grasp on genetics.. but I;m sort of wondering why there arent lines of bright orange or black shrimp yet.. of this species.. there might be in germany.. I found a really awesome site.. but google translate was pretty useless and my german is really really rusty... I can mainly remember horrific stories of witches that lived behind my house lol... So I couldnt really navigate it too well.. I basically gathered there are alot of color lines in the works or already established that we don't really have hear yet...