RCS in a slightly salted water

Back in Nov I think, I bought a batch of RCS from a local breeder and they've done very well. But they are not very red, more like light orange color. They were cheap so they aren't high grade RCSs. I have PFS which is light in color and have read that RCS turn darker with a dark substrate. I haven't tried that since I like PFS.

But recently I setup a QT with a bit of salt and placed one RCS in it (that's another story). In a span of a week, this RCS turn very red! This QT is bright and has the same PFS in it. This RCS looks beautiful and completely different than when it was in previous tank. Has anyone had a similar experience? I'm going to put another bland looking RCS in it and see what happens. Very interesting...

I have 3 tanks now that have shrimps in it. Main one is a 12G shrimp tank heavily planted with 2 cories and no other fish just RCS, ghost and a bamboo shrimps (all RCS in this tank is bland). Second is a 5G betta tank. This is where this particular RCS came from. This tank is nicely planted with hiding places for RCS. This RCS must have been stressed all the time with my psycho betta chasing him all the time. The RCS always hid at the base of a crypt. I rehomed this RCS in my 2.5G QT with newly acquired Multis. The Multis from time to time chase the RCS around so it must be stressed to. The QT is not planted and has very little to offer for the RCS at the moment. But he is bright red and beautiful!

Ok, perhaps it's the stress. I just put another one in the tank to see if it changes color to red. Here's a side by side of these guys. The one on the right is clearly red like an RCS is supposed to be I guess.



After the fish are removed from this tank, we'll see if the color remains red.

Not yet, first one took about a week to turn red. So there might be 2 factors, stress and salt. I'm slowly desalinating this QT to zero salt so that I can move my new fish into the main tank. If the new RCS doesn't turn red, I'll bring up the salinity back to original condition after moving the fish and see what happens. I'm using my TDS meter to track relative salinity. Main tank is 156 ppm, QT is 281 now, was 563 originally.

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