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Almost a year ago now I went to the Dutch national aquarist meeting of NBAT in Veenendaal and I brought along a canister with water and some pieces of leaves from my aquatic plants with persistent algae. I hoped to get advice on strategies to get rid of these. They were determined to be beard algae and besides advice about water quality I was also frequently told that shrimp would eat these algae for me.
This was the first time in 25 years of my aquarium hobby that I heard mention of tropical sweet water shrimp!
On the marketplace floor for members I found JM selling bags containing 6 C. serrata each. They didn't come cheaply but I got a few of them anyway. A few days later they all seemed to have disappeared in my tank, but I later gathererd that they had been searching all over the tank for the best hiding places and now they'd selected the best of these to hide themselves in. When I discussed this sometime later with mr. Bretveld from Zoetermeer, he proposed the interesting theory that in an average tank one only observes about 10% of the actual number of shrimp. Well, in my case that would be about half a percent because I rarely saw one specimen and often none at all...
Still, I think they're fantastic little creatures! They're peaceful, useful, funny and they provide an extra dimension to any tank next to the other familiar creatures like fish and snails in the aquarium.
When I visited Aad Bouman in Ede a couple of weeks later, I discovered a great variety in looks (colors, patterns) between the many shrimp he has. I got the idea to selectively breed the shrimp to enhance these differences. I got two small tanks so I could crossbreed later on to prevent side effects of inbreeding. I even put an Ancistrus in both tanks as I had been told that the symbiosys with bee shrimp stimulates explosive breeding. I tried to divide all my shrimp over these two tanks but to make a long story short: it turned out to be a complete flop.
I am lucky that about 6 survived at all. It might have had to do with the hot summer at the time, because the well known bee shrimp breeders that I called had all had a disastrous time with just dozens surviving out of their many hundreds. Temperatures above 29 degrees Celcius are apparently more that Caridina serrata can have.
I'm planning a new tank in our living room so the aquaristic juices are flowing again. This prompted me to start a search on the Internet for new information about C. serrata and although I'd run across the name Goddijn a couple of times already, I failed to find an e-mailaddress until I discovered your web site.
I would like to start off again with a good number of shrimp because I still feel that there is a good chance of success in selectively breeding a specfic color pattern of C. serrata.
Kind regards,
Charles Buddendorf
c.buddendorf@chello.nl
Charles Buddendorf aquarium website