native shrimp have color too!

lately i have been looking at my shrimp under a microscope. what i have been seeing is that shrimp dont have just one color pigment(kinda expected this). they seem to have different pigment cells for different colors, and blue is produced by tiny little granules that are much smaller than typical pigment cells. well, as it turns out, out native ghost shrimp have the exact same types of pigment cells as the more commonly kept shrimp like cherry shrimp, crystal red shrimp, etc.
this means that whoever can get good at breeding ghost shrimp can probably produce similar beautifully colored strains.

first, lets look at an amano shrimp:

showing the small blue granules(which im assuming contain quinine) located in the "branches" of some chromatophores.


zoomed out a bit. its showing at least three different colors, yellow, red, and blue. it seems to me that they are each produced in different ways, which would mean that there are three completely different genes for them. that might explain why shrimp genetics seems to be so tricky.



this ones is more zoomed out. the over all color of this amano shrimp was green with the naked eye. since no body has ever bred amano shrimp for color, they are essentially wild types. probably caught, since i dont know of any commercial breeder.

these next photos are of cherry shrimp, first high grade and then low grade. you can see the chromatophores sending out branches. from what i can tell, they grow in yellow, and then after they molt, turn red.

and, now for the native shrimp. these are ghost shrimp that were sourced from florida, specifically the tampa area. they show the same types of chromatophores as the above two shrimp, so as far as i can tell, they could probably be selectively bred to produce bright colors. the shrimp in these photos were clear to the naked eye.





this is a closup of a chromatophore. its at 1000x. the shrimp survived the photography. it did not survive the fish though...



and, just because i was trigger happy with the microscope camera, a short video:
http://s1242.photobu...rent=PR-C-1.mp4

Very nice. Thanks.

Usil

Amazing pictures, Auban. What strikes my mind though, is with the __illion ghost/grass shrimp we've all seen over the years, has anyone seen any with any abnormal or unusual coloration?....Such that someone might fancy the idea of breeding to try to create a color morph? I can't say that I have, but it doesn't mean that the possibility doesn't exist!

i have seen some that are more colorful than others, sure, but i dont think an actual color mutation would be very common. unless someone took the time to selectively breed them, i dont think we will ever see bright colored ghost shrimp. i do believe its possible though. the problem is in breeding them to begin with. their larval stage makes it a bit tricky...

I have never seen an interesting colored on in feeder tanks at the LFS. But we did get some interesting individuals one time in South Georgia that had a bluish spot where the front claws/arms attached and had an orange tips to the claws themselves.

I've seen some with fairly strong bands of color, but never an overall coloration. The bands were fairly unique compared to commercially available species though, and could conceivably be of interest. You'd have to really want to do it though. For commercial purposes there's certainly more money in starting with cherry shrimp (not that I think that would be profitable).

if i ever got around to setting something up for ghost shrimp, i would probably breed them myself right now i am breeding malawa shrimp. they are all wild types that have not been bred for color, and i want to document their mutations along the way. the main reason i am doing this is for interest alone. as far as i know, nobody has bred any mutated lines of malawa shrimp, so i should be working with normal wild type shrimp. later on, if i am able to get them display enough mutations for color, ill probably just give them away. my main interest is in understanding how the colors are displayed. i have asked a lot of people who make their living breeding shrimp, and they dont really know exactly how the colors are displayed or mutated and such. basically, shrimp genetics are complicated...

I have never understood the interest in morphs. I am a bit of a reptile guy, and appreciate the wild types much more than the selectively bred morphs. I guess I can appreciate the work that goes into it, but to me, I have always thought that nature (or God, whatever your beliefs) builds a perfect model. These morphs seem like an abomination to me. A grass shrimp is perfect at being a grass shrimp just the way it is. On the flip side, I own cattle, which have been selectively bred, and I continue it to this day(though it is for function, not form). Conundrum. God complex?

Either way, Ghost/Grass shrimp certainly do not lend themselves well to selective breeding. That pesky larval stage. I'm sure it could be done, but there will be little market for them because of their difficulty in propagation.

my interest lies mainly in genetics. from what i have seen, it seems to me that there are several ways that color can be expressed in shrimp. in my wild type malawa shrimp, i have seen at least two different chromatophors that show two distinct colors, while i also see the small granules that produce the blue color. in the red neocardinia shrimp(cherry shrimp) i only see one color, but there are several color morphs of the same species available in the pet trade. the cherry shirmp that i have looked at come from a couple different lines, and when bred together, produce pretty low grade, clear shrimp. i believe that they both express different types of mutations on the genes that control the red chromatophores, since one strain had very large chromatophores with thick branches and the other had very thin chromatophores with extremely long and numerous branches. breeding them together seems to have resulted in fewer chromatophores with thick, short branches. i looked at one yellow morph that had the normal red type chromatophore, except that only the very center was red. all the branches remained yellow, instead of turning red after the next molt. i know that if red and yellow are bred together, it produces brown and their offspring would produce some of all three colors, suggesting to me that there are different mutations on the same gene.

you take that simple complexity and throw in a few different colors, each with their own genes, and it starts to make sense why shrimp genetics can get so complicated. i really have no idea how the colors affect the shrimp in the wild. it seems that the actual color makes no difference to a female shrimp, she will breed with the first male that finds her after she molts. i know of some crayfish that cant seem to tell the difference between male and female from sight alone, with the males grabbing any crayfish that comes by and flipping them over to see if they are a suitable mate. im guessing in those cases, color is selectively bred for based on predation, since the crayfish themselves seem oblivious to the color of other crayfish.

all this leads me to believe that decapods in general are remarkably well adapted to blend in with their environment. most of them seem to carry the genes to produce practically any color.

Take what you will from this pic. I took it ~5 years ago at work when I was peeling a bag of frozen/thawed penaeid shrimp. I did nothing to enchance or edit the picture. Even though the shrimp were being fed to animals, they were fit for human consumption. Not sure if that means they were treated, or dyed to make them more appealing? Regardless, penaeids can be quite colorful as well.

This is a old thread, but I caught some ghost shrimp a few days ago and I have noticed a few have red hues and specks on them, I am going to try and selectivly breed them for color.

Step one: figure out how to breed them.

I know how to breed them I have succesfully bred ghost shrimp like 30 times.

Please share. That would be a topic of great interest to many of us. Are you talking about Palaemonetes paludosus?

Yup, I can write up a blog thing tomorrow if y'all want. Yup.

I've seen them breed once, but was not able to raise any larvae. Others have had similar experiences.

Yeah, I had to breed them a few times before I found out how, what I do is I get a 10g and I put gravel and a lot of LIVE plants in their and I put about 40 same size ghost shrimp in their, and when a see one that is berried(not saddled, saddled is when their egs are still in their ovaries, berried is when they. Are on their swimmeretts) I put it in another small tank(all I had available was a half gallon tank) and I put a airstone, tank water, gravel(you have to have a substrate because the shrimp can't move well in a barebottom tank), plants(I used hornwort at the time but java moss and marimo moss balls are better), and then I add the female, I leave the plants in a breeder box for like 2-3 weeks to develope stuff on it, then when the eggs hatch DON'T take the female out, you always get larvae in the net and you can kill the larvae from stress, I will make a big post latter but I have company over so it will probaly be tonight.

Oh and I have tried the method for brine shrimp, where you get a 2litre bottle, make it brackish water, and put a airstone in the bottom, it doesn't work, the only perk is that u can see the laravl while they live for a week.

Brine shrimp should not be in brackish water. Their normal environment is saltier than seawater.

I've been able to raise fairy shrimp with some limited success, but it certainly wasn't economical as a food source.