Colour & Intensity

[BlueBolts]

Been experimenting with light colour & intensity, and just wanted to share the results of my observations.

Tank A's lighting setup uses LED @5500k-6500k, low light (i.e. equivalent to 10w to 25 lt)

Tank B's lighting setup uses LED @5500k-6500k, double the intensity (i.e. equivalent to 20w to 25 lt), and have noticed better colouration/shell coverage.

Tank C's lighting setup uses LED @10000k, double the intensity (i.e. equivalent to 20w to 25 lt), and have noticed even better colouration/shell coverage.

I've briefly read that 10k for light colour is the ideal (?), and preferred by many breeders.

Thoughts and opinions ?

[Squiggle]

I have to agree with you there BB, I have noticed a degrading of colour in the tank where the plants have grown over the whole surface, whereas in the tanks that get a lot of light & not much floating plants, those shrimp are much better in colour & intensity. I think I will be using all 10000k on my rack, I was going to use 50/50 7000k & 10000k, not anymore! :victorious:

[amkr]

Interesting.

I'd say that the kelvin rating of the source just shows better colouration to our eyes. 10,000K is getting very blue! Will make the whites glow quite a bit.

I hate using watts to describe lighting intensity :p

[Squiggle]

I have to disagree, my shrimp have almost no colour at all when in a shaded tank, gaps in the white & very lacking in red & black :encouragement:

[amkr]

Shade is a little different than blue light :p

[Squiggle]

Still, point is, low light = no colour, high light = lots of colour :encouragement:

[amkr]

Yep, thats a given. But I'd debate weather the temperature of the light changes the colour or just the perception of colour.

[Squiggle]

One way to check, put them all under the same light when checking them :encouragement:

[shrimpstan]

Yep' date=' thats a given. But I'd debate weather the temperature of the light changes the colour or just the perception of colour.[/quote']

really interesting point mate.

BB is it possible to test by swaping shrimp from the 10000k tanks to the 5500-6500k tanks and see if the colour is visibly more intense under the same lower light and vise versa?

this should confirm or bust this one

[amkr]

It will confirm or bust the colour perception aspect.

Then we have to discover if its actually the colour temperature of a specific spectrum doing the colour changes.

[BlueBolts]

I had previously done this with one of my quality CRS. The pics below isnt great, as I didn't think of documenting/presenting the results formally, but the segments on the body (lines) were very clearly visible, and some very minor parts became a tad translucent.

At 10000k, double intensity light

At 6500k

I didn't test for shell thickness/quality just based on colour (i.e. 10000k vs 6500k), as the 10k light unit was just more powerful in terms of wattage, i.e. the double intensity.....nevertheless, the results were clear in my simple experiment that lighting made "some" different in shell appearance on quality shrimp.... Note, culls still looked like culls with diff lighting/intensity, still require a quality shrimp to "enhance" them.

[MrShrimp]

Wow, that SSS has got nice legs. The higher the kelvin, the more blue in it. The lower kelvin has more red/yellow in the spectrum.

[chabbs]

I never thought that light intensity would make such a significant difference. Looks like I should replace my lights with 10000k bulbs :)