My rainbow shrimp and confusion:
I had three of them in my 20 gallon tank since 3/98. On 1/15/99 and 1/16/99, we had a 42 hour power outage due to an ice storm. The normally 72 degree F tank dropped to about 54 degrees F for most of that time. One shrimp died but the other two survived. Another shrimp died around 5/22/99, presumably of natural causes. The last two vanished sometime in June of 1999. They must have decomposed out of site. So rainbow shrimp can live at least 15 months. On 7/31/99, I bought three more so I will keep posting here on their progress. One died on 1/19/00. The other two were alive and still about an inch long as of 11/29/00. They became a reddish brown with a tan stripe down their backs. They eat using pincers. By early 2001, only one rainbow shrimp was still alive, and he or she was 20 months old!
On 3/16/01, I got two more "rainbow shrimp." These however look different. Instead of being reddish brown with the tan stripe, they are clear with a dark digestive tract. The tank next to them was labeled as japonica meaning Amano shrimp but those looked the same as my "rainbow shrimp" except for more dots on their sides. Neither of these shrimp look like the photos I have seen of either Amano shrimp or japonica. So, my store and most shrimp "experts" have got this all super confused. To make it more confusing, the two best sites in the links section that have photos show a photo of the wood shrimp that looks like my rainbow shrimp. Note, there are no fans in the photo of the "wood shrimp." The real wood shrimp has fans and is much larger and does not look like my rainbow shrimp or the photo on the site. My head is spinning! To make things even more bizarre, after a few months in my 20 gallon tank, the new rainbow shrimp changed appearance to look like my one older rainbow shrimp so I guess they are the same species! One of their photos is above.
On 6/1/01, I got four more rainbow shrimp for my newly re-done 50 gallon tank. The three remaining rainbow shrimp in the 20 gallon joined them on 6/16/01 so I now have seven (if they are all still alive) rainbow shrimp in my 50 gallon tank! The 20 gallon tank is being redone from scratch and had four rainbow shrimp added. On 11/3/01, I removed the first rainbow shrimp to die in the 50 gallon tank. Unlike shed exoskeletons, the shrimp was orange and when squished, guts came out instead of just collapsing an empty shell. So, a shrimp died.
I bought four shrimp for my twenty gallon tank on 7/8/01 that were labeled as rainbow shrimp but looked nothing like my rainbow shrimp that I have in my other tank. These four were clear with brown spots along the side. There were three tanks at the store. One was marked rainbow shrimp, one was marked Amano shrimp, and one was marked Japonica shrimp. From what I have read, Amano and Japonica are the same shrimp. The prices were about $3, $9, and $7 respectively. The shrimp that look like my old shrimp were in one of the other tanks not marked as rainbow shrimp. The other two tanks had identical looking shrimp. I think the people at the store messed up the labels. No one there knows anything about the shrimp's true identities (scientific names)! I thought the ones I got may be Amano shrimp. They use their hands to eat like the ghost and rainbow shrimp do. Later, these new shrimp changed colors at various times and then appeared to look like my other rainbow shrimp but I am still not sure! On 2/1/02, I bought two real Japonica shrimp for comparison.