# Selective Breeding



## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

I got a little bored today and decided to start up a project to see how many generation it takes to get a higher grade wild bee shrimp that i got from Frank's aquarium today. Does anyone know if this is possible or did i take on an impossible project? If it is possible, any tips on selective breeding and on grades?


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## Fish on the Mind (Feb 9, 2012)

From what I know you find ones that you like the qualities of and breed them and be selective on what you want to get too. So say you want bright colors find ones that do and hopefully there offspring would have the same or brighter colors. At least that is just what I think though. I'm deff no breeder 

Happy breeding


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## randy (Jan 29, 2012)

I think it all depends on what you start with and what you want to end up with. If you start with entirely colourless wild bee shrimp and want to end up with any grade of CRS, it could be a long and fruitless project. If you just want certain pattern, it might be more promising. You will need a lot of tanks and a lot of time and you will produce a lot of in-between shrimp that's hard to sell. 

And if you do end up with CRS (which is next to impossible), it's not of too much commercial value since there are a lot of CRS already. However, if you get a, say, Crystal Green Shrimp, then your name will be remembered.

Just my opinion.


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## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

I don't plan on selling them, despite it being pretty cool to have my name remembered as the person who started a new line of crystal shrimp, that wasn't on my mind when i took on this project. 
Its more just the fun and fulfills that need of doing something in killing time. Anyhow, the bee shrimp i have has a tint of white with three black stripes or brown stripes on their body. Does that count as colour? What would i look for in getting a certain pattern/colour out?


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## randy (Jan 29, 2012)

Let's say you want to get a bee shrimp entirely black, then you start with your wild bee shrimp, breed them, in F1 (first generation after the breeding pair), pick the ones with more black to breed F2, and it will go on and on and on. The idea is to pick the ones with more black coverage to breed the next generation and the pick from the new generation to get something closer to your goal (in this example, entirely black).

Then you will hit a problem, likely somewhere between F5 to F10, your new shrimp will have high fatality rate and many will be born deformed. So you should have something closer to your goal but the shrimplet will be very hard to keep alive. So what do you do? Find some wild bee shrimp to cross with your latest generation to strengthen your shrimp. This brings you back a few generations but necessary. And then you start again and again, and some more.

When will you get one entirely black? No one knows. But if you do get one, it is likely to be very hard to breed, very hard to keep alive, and doesn't breed true. (sounds familiar?) So you do a few more generations, but this time, you try to purify your shrimp so you get a higher percentage of your target pattern, and at the same time try to use the ones that are more hardy. You may have to corss breed again with wild bee shrimp at times to again strengthen the gene pool.

So, 20 years later, you might get something, or you may not.

However, if you're extremely lucky, you may get a mutant in F1 that is what you're looking for (or you change what you're looking for to what the mutant looks like). That saves you 20 years ;-) There are lottery winners almost every week, but there was probably only one lucky Japanese who got the ancestor of all the CRS. It probably happens a few time in the wild but those mutants are next to impossible to survive.

Okay, again, just my opinion. I took Genetics and Breeding exactly 20 years ago, don't expect me to remember too much. Most of the stuff I said above is from some online reading.


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## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

That blew my mind. I don't know if I should be happy I found a project that takes 20 yrs or sad that I'm devoting 20 yrs to this. What class did u take genetics and breeding? Haha this seems like its going to be fun


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## getochkn (Jul 10, 2011)

Well it may not be 20 years, but it will be a while to get what you want and you really do need lots of tanks. If you want to put them in a tank and let them go and see what happens, cool. If you really want to selectively breed them, you need to take out all the ones that show a nice color/pattern you want in one tank, cross them with another, back cross to the parents, keep track of who has been crossed to who so you don't get too many backcrosses, and as randy said, you will need new stock sooner or later. Granted, getting wild caught, they could have a nice gene selection and you may not run into problem until 10-20 generations down the road as the possibility that the ones you got came from all different parents is possible or they came from a small inbred pool of water and are already 5 generations into being inbred, you don't know.

I was going to work on some Tibee crosses but don't have the tanks to dedicate to it so decided against it. Breeders overseas that I know that do it have like 80-90 tanks around to move shrimp around and breed in. 

I would say add them to a tank, let them breed and be happy. Without having 10-15 tanks to separate them, keep track of exact crossings and parents, etc, you won't get much. I already have 2 tanks with crystals and various breeder boxes going just trying to improve my crystal grades and make sure certain males berry certain females and its work just keeping track of that. lol.


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## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

You sound like you're having so much fun! Dang. I only got 5 tanks and 2 pickle jar that got pfr in them. Oh man I didn't even think of backcrossing. I guess I'll just mess around as much as I can and see what comes. Lol. Though what you said got my mind going, keeping track, using a breeder box, etc. Sounds like this project is just what I wanted haha


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## getochkn (Jul 10, 2011)

thinkshane said:


> You sound like you're having so much fun! Dang. I only got 5 tanks and 2 pickle jar that got pfr in them. Oh man I didn't even think of backcrossing. I guess I'll just mess around as much as I can and see what comes. Lol. Though what you said got my mind going, keeping track, using a breeder box, etc. Sounds like this project is just what I wanted haha


It is fun. I have a really nice SSS male that I got from novice who hasn't had a chance to get any action yet, so he's the breeder box with some berried SS females who about to drop. In fact one is giving birth as I type this. I saw 1 brand new baby, then a second one just a few seconds ago, so hopefully my male can get some nice solid white SSS gene's into them, then next is to let those females out, and then when they are almost ready to hatch, they will go in the breeder box with a nice crystal black I got from beta4u.


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## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

so what kind of patterns/colours do you think i can get or breed from wild bee shrimp? is it true that they'll never look like crystal shrimps?


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## randy (Jan 29, 2012)

To be honest, I don't think this is like designing a building that you start with nothing and design what you want. I think most people first start breeding certain species then from the experience they decide to pick what they think is promising and go toward that direction.

For example, at beginning, Cherry Shrimp was just Cherry Shrimp. Then people see the red in Cherry is what would look good, so they pick the redder one or the ones with more red coverage and selectively bred the generations and eventually the offspring become 1. More red, 2. More true breeding. (i.e. sakura or FR)

I would suggest to start with your own line of species such as Fire Red and go for some character after you have seen a lot of baby FRs and knows what can be an achievable character. If you are lucky and found one with red or orange eyes then try to stabilize that line. If you don't get exactly what you want, FRs are relatively easy to keep and sell so it's not a big deal.

My personal dream is to get a stable line of SSS CRS with red legs, even that I think will take years although there are already SSS CRS and there are already red leg CRS and there might be already a stable line with SSS/red leg, but I just want my own line -) 

To answer your question, my first bachelor degree was earned in National Taiwan Ocean University, major Aquaculture... Genetics and Breeding was a third year (or was it fourth) course, I remember that was the hardest one in the program, you learn to calculate the distance between some chromosome and predict the probability of certain pattern in the offspring along with other things that totally complicated the XX (female) XY (male) type of genetics.\ -- genetics is way more complicated than that.


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