The debate for whether a breeder shrimp is pure have been long going and never really understood. Today, let us break this unsolved mystery and have a better understanding about pure lineage.

The following method can be applied to test whether your shrimp is pure. In the example below, we will use the following shrimp for the test.

1) A female pure red shrimp
2) A male pure red shrimp
3) A female golden shrimp
4) A male golden shrimp

To test whether the female shrimp is pure:
Female pure red shrimp x male golden shrimp

To test whether the male shrimp is pure:
Male pure red shrimp x female golden shrimp

In both cases, all offsprings should have crystal red shrimp appearance. The chances of golden shrimp in the offspring are extremely low and are technically close to zero.

The offsprings are not considered pure, however the parent pure red shrimp still remains pure as it’s genes have not been modified. Now let us take detail look into why we cross the pure lineage with golden shrimp.

Table 1.1

A capital letter would represent the dominant gene.
A small letter would represent the recessive gene.

R would represent a pure red lineage (PRL)
S would represent a golden shrimp.

In pure lineage, what would we would not want in the gene is the gene from Golden shrimps. Golden shrimps in nature would have recessive alleles.

Upon crossing the two shrimps, you can see that the offspring appearance would all be red as the only dominant gene here is red.

Table 1.2

In table 1.2, we can see that when a normal crystal red that is not pure crossing with a golden shrimp, the offspring would have about 50% golden shrimp(Theoretically).

Therefore, it is not logical to use any other shrimp to replace the golden shrimp to conduct this test as we want to narrow down the type of traits, to as low as possible.

As mentioned in the earlier post, some traits from the previous generation will be removed when selective breeding is done. It is difficult to pass down all features of the parents, but it is not impossible to do that.

The calculations as above are purely for theory purposes. Such genetics calculations are complex and only results will prove as certain traits are affected by other factors such as environment.

Do drop us an email if you have any doubts on this or any further information on this. Lastly, do have fun shrimping!