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Thursday, June 30, 2011

Japanese Ebiten Pure Blood Line Crystal Red Shrimp




Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Fish Boraras for Shrimp Tank

I got some nice and gentle little boraras fish for my shrimp tanks.
I like it in nice red color. Well, this photo could not present their beauty (my camera's limit).
About the seller, they have very nice fish, and very professional package, but they charge way to much shipping and packaging fee, which I think is really unreasonable. Anyway, I receive this little guys safely, that's of the most important thing.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Selective Breeding --- Nakajima Breeding Technique

How to  selective breeding?
How to get offspring at your desirable characteristics and color trait?

The solutions may vary depending on what you have,, and what you are going to put into the project.

What I am going to introduce today is called Nakajima Breeding Technique. Most information is from: http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/tonina-bestcrs/article?mid=28&prev=139&next=25. That's in Chinese, translated from Japanese. I just try to keep the main basic idea about this technique.

The very first factor that affect the breeding project would be the size of your tank. Let's take the example of a 60cm tank. First of all, we need to start from the pairing shrimps. If you put it favored 3 ~ 4 males, and then relatively more females. In this case, the male will pick whichever female it likes to mate. It is like a short cut to success. If the number of males is not enough, it will decrease the rate of successful mating. On the other hand, if the number of male is excess, ready to mate female, being weak after molting, will be chased by one, and ,another, and another males. Ultimately, Exhaustion. So, you need more plants,,more hidden places...

After successful mating, let berried female stays in the same tank for 3~4 days, and then move it carefully and slowly to the tank rich of moss and micro-organisms (of course, you have to prepare this tank ahead).  In this way, you have clear idea of what pairs make the offsprings. Make it easier for future selection. And it could prevent the trouble from males.

The first day eggs are hatched, you should start to feed baby shrimp food that's rich in protein. New born shrimplets are difficult to seen for the first week. There are several choice of special design baby shrimp food. There are not great different between them. What I am using now is from Ebi-Ten Shrimp Bacter, and Borneo Wild Bebi Shrimp Food, which you can find from my Product Page. When shrimplets start to color up, if you find that the number of shrimplets decreases, well, there are lots of reasons. One of the most important one is that babies are highly sensitive to temperature change that's greater than ±2~3℃. Some hobbies may use heater and a chiller at the same time to keep temperature within desirable range, minimize the temperature change ( which could be really costly).

After food and temp control, another question is water change. Never ever change lots of water. A idea rate of water change could be 1/100 once a week. For the 60 cm tank, that would be 500cc water change once a week. When adding new water, make sure that things like chrome, etc are filtered out, and new water temp should be close the the tank, and you can mix some minerals to new water before add it to the tank. use drip acclimation system to slowly add in new water. For the water loss that's due to evaporation, you should add in new water in other way, like the distilled water.

Above is a brief introduction.. and there are more to know and discuss in the future. The following picture is one of my newly rearranged tank. I follow the basic idea. Now in this tank, only a few berried shrimps, the rest are all new born shrimplets. It greatly helps increasing the growth rate of shrimplets. Now I feed baby shrimp food twice a day, in the morning and at night.