Hello fams! With regards to my old blog post about pure lineage which you can find here, I would like to talk about adding new bloodline into your lineage after several generations.

There have been news circulating that after inbreeding for several generations, you would see deformities in your future generations and the lifespan of the shrimp will also be shorten. Deformities like odd shape of the shrimp or stout shrimps will appear.

Inbreeding is a very unique technique used by many breeders. It can be use to reveal unwanted traits of the shrimp but commonly used to carry your desired traits over to the next generation.

How it can be used to reveal unwanted traits is better explained in the blog post link above. So I would touch on how it is used to carry desired traits to the next generations and the problems about it.

Selective breeding comes in a way where we have to focus on a certain traits of the shrimp and cross breed the ones we have selected. For example, if we want to focus on the shrimp having redder legs, we picked a pair of shrimp with the reddest leg from the colony and breed them. By doing this, the chances of our offspring having redder legs would be higher.

Now comes the tricky part. By focusing on the legs, we might unknowingly pair up a shrimp with genetic disorder, causing this disorder to be more dominant in the future offspring, or some would call it an expressed recessive trait. In theory, the percentage of this happening is about 25%.

Here is an illustration to why. Now lets take an example of inbreeding two shrimps together. Say both shrimps carry the recessive gene of “big head symptoms” and is represented by a small letter b while the good gene is represented by a capital letter G. Both shrimp shows no trait of the “big head symptoms” therefore the “big head symptoms” is recessive.

The percentage of the offspring would be labelled as above and here is what it means in detail.
Gb = 50% of the offspring would still carry the recessive gene of “big head symptoms” with them but does not show it in their appearances.
GG = 25% of the offspring have eliminated the “big head symptoms” and these shrimps are actually perfect shrimps!
bb = 25% of the offspring will carry both recessive gene of “big head symptoms” and will show it in their appearances

Big head symptoms is a deformity where the head of the shrimp is bigger than usual. These shrimps have very short lifespan and are often culled away.

These are put in laymen terms for hobbyist to better understand if it is necessary to input new bloodline into your own lineage. In summary, you can just cull out the unwanted traits from your new generation and still maintain your lineage without adding in new blood. If you would like to improve on certain traits in your lineage, it would be great to add in new blood that carries the desired trait.

Hence the reason why some lineage are expensive because the breeder have put in a lot of effort into culling out unwanted shrimps from their bloodline and perfecting it as time goes by.

If you are have been breeding from the same pool of shrimps for a long time, perhaps you can consider being more strict in the qualities you are looking for when culling shrimps to perfect your own lineage! Remember that a lot of patience and effort is needed when doing selective breeding and I wish this little article here can help you understand inbreeding a little more.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us an email at hello@madshrimp.com. We would be glad to hear from you. Happy shrimping!