Must be doing something right!

As I mentioned in my last post rather a lot has been happening. The Taiwans are breeding and I have two lots of offspring. At the moment they are about 2mm and 3mm. Fingers crossed that they survive.

They are incredibly difficult to photograph but I have got a rather poor shot of one of them. I've counted 9 babies so far but the tank has loads of hiding places and moss.

My first baby!

There are a number of Taiwans berried so hopefully some more to follow.

Interestingly the F1s in the adjacent tank have not yet started to produce although some of the females look as if they are due any day.

I am still experimenting with lighting for photos and think that I may have to buy a flash so that I can use a smaller aperture and get more depth of field.

In the meantime I am taking the Heath Robinson approach and using solely the tank lighting or supplementing with a powerful cree flashlight.

Not the best photos from the Taiwan tank and as always my favourite shrimp decided to hide. I have one Panda which has the most amazing fine spearmint green stripe.

I am leaving everyone to get on with breeding and feeding for a while but I do want to see if I can replicate this little chap.

Then I now have adjacent tanks with Red Tigers and Royal Blue Orange Eyes. I am running these tanks at CRS/CBS pH at the moment but upped the TDS to 250. My guru and mentor advised that whilst their natural habitat is more alkaline, or rather more neutral, they have now been bred for long enough that they have adapted to a lower pH.

As you can see the only OERBT I could photograph insisted on resting on the front glass but even so a beautiful colour and I have high hopes for this tank.

The tigers look perhaps a bit Tibee and seem to have CRS in their make up but certainly have potential.

My plan, subject to change on a whim, is to let them breed, I hope, for a few generations before I start selecting.

The other possibility is perhaps to try a female Red Ruby or Red Wine Taiwan in the Tiger tank and go for the unexpected! Before I think about doing this I will let the Taiwan tank build a bit.

I also now have two tanks with decent grade CBS and CRS - probably SS and I will follow up with more on these once they have grown a little.

Last but certainly not least I have Benibachi PRL. This is the group which were delayed in transit over a very hot weekend thanks to an "outage" at UPS.

I really feared the worst as I had ordered 15! The poor things had clearly had a bit of a rough time and two died during my 5 hour drip acclimatisation and at least one more died the following day.

I do wonder that after their trauma whether I should have shortened the acclimatisation period to get them in to clean water sooner. There is of course no way I will know. Obviously there should be 13 now but this morning I have only been able to count 6. I suspect the survivors are keeping a low profile and the tank certainly has plenty of quiet places with lots of wood and moss.

The ones which are showing themselves are looking better by the day with excellent white and red. On advice I have also upped the TDS in this tank to help them through their first moults.

I did this a tiny amount each day and after a few weeks at this higher level I will bring the TDS back down to 150ish.

The PRLs apparently have thicker exoskeletons than other shrimp and the theory is that the increase in calcium will help.

One final thing before I finish with a few early PRL shots is that the CRS are much more gregarious than the PBL. Tank parameters are the same and I wonder this is the norm?

As a postscript I have just finished my weekly water changes and the F1s have in fact bred. The babies are over 3mm now so they must have been in hiding. Now the fun of finding out what has been produced!