Inbreeding and Line breeding
What works?
A shoutout to the breeder who have asked for this article to be covered, thanks for your support!
According to definition inbreeding is breeding very closely related shrimps with each other such as father-daughter (F0-F1), mother-son (F0-F1) brother-sister (F1-F1). Outcrossing is breeding totally unrelated shrimps or very distance relative, While line breeding is breeding lies somewhere in the middle.
Line breeding as you can see lies somewhere in-between inbreeding and outcrossing and can be understood as a planned inbreeding or a strategized inbreeding.
The purpose of inbreeding is to keep or enhance a certain trait or bloodline such as to continue for example the redness or size of a PRL.
The purpose of linebreeding is to keep the trait of a particular shrimp. For example red legs on a PRL.
So using both breeding method has it’s pros and con because too much inbreeding while can continue or enhance the desirable trait but run the risk of degrading shrimps of deform nature.
Where should i start?
When we first purchase our shrimp from a breeder, high chance the shrimps are closely related, however buying from a bigger breeder the chance of the shrimp being related are further apart.
When the shrimps are closely related, we can assume that they’re most likely brother sisters or cousin or close cousin. That way, we will start with mass breeding them before starting to select.
For example, i have selective took out from a brood 2 males and 3 females to selective breed, they are closely related cousins as i control the males that i use from 2-4 depending also on the number of females. 
When close cousin breed, they will firstly continue the desirable trait but will not really enhance the trait and with mass breeding, the idea is to get as many shrimplets as possible in the shortest possible time. From there lock in after a few generations the desirable trait you would like and then start inbreeding.
When should it end?
We can safely assume when we purchase shrimps from a breeder chances are the shrimps are very closely related unless the breeders keeps multiple tanks of the same parentage and keeps a strict breeding methodology.
As you can see in the example if we start off with a pair and slowly breed them to masses and then when we have our shrimplets (also helps to prevent too much inbreeding as male as small as 0.8cm can fly), it is important to remove them. The whole idea is to create 2 lines and relative or half/brother/sister (cousins). This way it will help pass on desirable trait and minimize undesirable trait when half brother/sister mate and at the end of the continuum if one would like to inject yet another desirable trait, an outcross can be made when you purchase the same line from the same breeder as we can safely again assume they are distant relative.
This PRL has been inbred (crossback) to maintain the desirable trait of size and redness. Now i’ll start breeding to a good number and split into two tanks so that i’ll have cousins. It takes almost 2 years to get to this stage.
selective breeding “Be All End All”
Selective breeding takes time, years and years of consistency but many give up before results are seen. Selective breeding is the Be All End All in raising the quality of the shrimps.
This can be modified depending and minimally you’ll need 3 tanks to get to the desirable trait, i have expanded the number of tanks to split out the improvement tank and championship tank.
Main Breeding tank: when we start breeding 2M 8F of decent quality, this tank will continue to breed for shrimplets.
Shrimplet tank: this is where we will house all the shrimplets and once you have decent female, put it back into the main breeding tank. Over time you will find that there could be 2-3 good males and 10 good females, you can then take them out and put into the improvement tank.
Improvement tank: Strict inbreeding happens, and then the shrimplet can be scoop out into another shrimplet tanks and then the process above continues and then get to the championship tank which would probably be your goal to get there.
However, when you get there, the shrimps are fairly inbred, so now it will be good to split the tank into two and then get cousins so that the genetics pool do not get too similar.
Hope it helps! If not drop me a PM in messenger facebook and i can clarify any questions 🙂
