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The cherry shrimp family tree: Neocaridina colour lines

Family tree of Neocaridina davidi colour lines drawn with pixel-art shrimp from Shrimprium. A brown wild shrimp at the top branches into Red Cherry, then Sakura, Fire Red and Painted Fire Red, with Red Rili as a second branch from Red Cherry. Dashed lines from the wild shrimp lead to yellow, orange, blue, green and black shrimp, whose origins are unclear.

Every cherry shrimp colour you see in a shop belongs to one species, Neocaridina davidi. This family tree shows how the main colour lines relate to the brown wild shrimp they came from. I drew it with the shrimp from Shrimprium.

The red line. Breeders in Taiwan and Japan turned the wild shrimp red in the 1990s.12 The reds were then graded by how deep and solid the colour is: Red Cherry, Sakura, Fire Red and Painted Fire Red.3 These grades aren’t separate branches so much as steps along one line, each selected for a stronger red. Around 2010, the Red Rili, a red shrimp with a clear or white patch on its body, appeared in Taiwan.45

The other colours. Yellow, orange, blue, green and black shrimp are the same species too.67 Where each line first came from is not well documented, so I drew them with dashed lines straight from the wild shrimp.

For the full story of how a brown shrimp became red, read Cherry shrimp weren’t always red.

Footnotes

  1. Earth.com, “Red cherry shrimp”. Selective breeding in Asia; worldwide popularity from the 1990s. ↩

  2. Mad Shrimp, “The Neocaridina Story: From Cherry Shrimp to Now”. Competing accounts of the first red line. ↩

  3. Shrimp and Snail Breeder, “Red Cherry Shrimp Grading”. Grades of red. ↩

  4. Aquarium Glaser, “Neocaridina heteropoda RILI”. Introduced as a new pattern from Taiwan. ↩

  5. Flip Aquatics, “Species Spotlight: Red Rili Shrimp”. Developed around 2010. ↩

  6. U.S. Geological Survey, “Cherry shrimp (Neocaridina davidi) – Species Profile”. Colour morphs of the species. ↩

  7. “All Shades of Shrimp: Preferences of Colour Morphs of a Freshwater Shrimp Neocaridina davidi (Decapoda, Atyidae) for Substrata of Different Colouration”. Colour morphs of the species. ↩