Ultra Blue

A bright blue shrimp — solid blue all over, not patchy.

Arrives young and paler. The blue thickens as they grow, and needs a strong light to show properly — under a weak light they look almost black.

One price, no grades. The colour comes with age, so sorting juveniles would be guesswork.

Neocaridina — the easier of our two shrimp families, hardy and quick to breed, and a good first shrimp. Numbers in the FAQ.

Blue Neocaridina usually come as one of two things: a Blue Dream, which often goes pale and patchy, or a Blue Diamond, so dark it reads as black in the tank. Our Ultra Blue (also sold as Super Blue) was line-bred from Blue Diamond stock for a brighter blue that keeps the Diamond’s thick, full-body pigment — so it stays visibly blue moving through the tank instead of vanishing into the shadows.

The family trees of the blue Neocaridina are tangled — Blue Dream is traced by different breeders to Carbon Rili or to Chocolate stock, Blue Diamond to Chocolate — so we describe ours by what it does, not by a pedigree.

About the photo. The shrimp pictured is one of the best-looking adults from the batch, under a strong light. Juveniles arrive lighter and more see-through; the blue packs in with each moult.

Two things shape how an Ultra Blue looks in your tank:

• Light: The pigment is dense enough that a weak or plain white light cannot get through it, and the shrimp reads dark. A strong full-spectrum (WRGB) light brings the blue out.
• Colour builds with age: Young Neocaridina are naturally more see-through. The blue thickens and fills in as they grow, until the body is solid blue at full size.

We grade by the traits that genuinely vary within a batch — pattern density, colour saturation, how far colour wraps around the shell. Where those differences are visible in the tank from day one, we sort them and price each tier for what it actually is.

Ultra Blues are not sortable that way, because the solid blue is tied to age: a paler juvenile today is simply younger, not lesser. Tiering them on shipping-day colour would be charging you for growth that happens in your tank anyway.

So Ultra Blues are one grade, one price — robust unsexed juveniles from the same colony.