Does temperature affect the sex of cherry shrimp?
Cherry shrimp can happily live in a large range of temperatures but with the aim of breeding, is there ideal range for maximum shrimp production and also proportion of females as a shrimp colony of all males is not much use for breeding.
A group of scientists from the Izmir Katip Celebi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan universities in Turkey (Serezli et al.) have studied the affect of temperature on the sex ratio of red cherry shrimp (neocaridina davidi). The study consisted of three tanks kept at each temperature (20,23 and 26°C) whilst the survival rate, hatch time and egg quantity was also recorded for each temperature.
What is the best temperature for a cherry shrimp tank.
Quick answer? - 23°C
Long version:
From Serezli et al. I was able to use the data to get a rate of male and females for the three temperatures tested, by calculating the (# of eggs)/(hatch duration)*(Survival %)*(Sex %) to get a rate of shrimp per day for each sex and then plotting the high and low values as shown in the graph below.
The rate of male shrimp seems to be directly related to temperature and I would expect it to reach a maximum if higher temperatures were tested.
From the graph it can be seen that while the rate of females is higher in the 20°C test the rate of males is very low. There are more shrimp per day in the 26°C tank however the majority are males so for optimal breeding the data from this study suggests that temperatures around 23°C are ideal for maximum shrimp production with a high female ratio.
My thoughts on this shrimp study
Unfortunately it is only a small study with a limited number of temperatures but it is at least some actual data and helps to narrow it down rather than wading through the hundreds of suggestions on the internet.
Only red cherry shrimp were tested and the results may be different for other colour variants of cherry shrimp. When yellow cherry shrimp first became popular in Australia there seemed to be a very high proportion of males bred, this may be due to the fact that quite often they were kept in a low pH tank with Crystal shrimp. Ideally it would be great to have more studies done on the effect of temperature and also the affect of pH on red cherry shrimp as well as on other coloured cherry shrimp and also for other shrimp species.
References:
Serezli, Ramazan & Atalar, Sina & Hamzaçebi, Sevim & Kurtoğlu, İlker Zeki & Yandi, Ilhan. (2017). To what extent does temperature affect sex ratio in red cherry shrimp, neocaridina davidi? The scenario global warming to offspring sex ratio. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin. 26.
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