Marine is too much work for me as well. Too expensive as well, and I’m not a fan of having to figure out which fish were wild caught, since a huge proportion of marine fish available in the trade are wild caught. I’m not into depleting nature for my own amusement.
Shrimp are fantastic and easily my favorite thing to watch, beating out the variety of snails by just a touch. However most of the commonly available colored ones can interbreed so if you get like red and blue neocardinias (cherry/fire shrimp and blue dream/blue velvet shrimp respectively) you’ll end up with babies (maybe after a few generations, maybe after the first breeding cycle) that revert to normal brown/clear coloring.
This chart is a huge help because it really drills down which species of shrimp you can house without that problem. (Edit to change link to a better chart)
https://www.ukaps.org/forum/attachments/shrimp-crossbreeding-chart-jpg-jpg.146825/
Or if you don’t care about the offspring color intensity, you can get cull packs on Aquabid (like eBay, but aquatic stuff only) for decently cheap, and it’s usually a mixed selection of peach, blue, and cherry neos that don’t have the intense coloring the breeder wants. Super easy to care for, ready breeders, fun to watch, and you can have glass shrimp with them! (ghost/grass/glass).
Apologies for the walls of text here, this is one of my special interests 😅
Oh wow! That chart is amazing! Thank you! I didn’t know about the interbreeding.
Sorry I actually changed the one I linked to a better one that’s easier to understand and much more detailed.
https://www.ukaps.org/forum/attachments/shrimp-crossbreeding-chart-jpg-jpg.146825/
Try this instead :) green “y” means they can breed.
Thanks. I’m bookmarking both, but this second one is so much more complicated. I may have to give up on my dream just on the difficulty of trying to figure out what mix would actually work!
