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Gang,

Almost since the beginning of my tanking hobby, about 8 months ago, I have platies in one of my tanks. It started out with 2 female and 1 male Sunset Platy of which one female gave me 9 fry that I saved and raised. Unfortunately, both adult females died before the babies grew up. The male platy is not the father as the females were already pregnant when I got them.

The 9 babies are by now adults and have babies themselves. I cannot say who the father of the babies is, but it for sure is a Sunset Platy as I don’t have any other ones in this tank. I am taking no protective measures towards the new fry, some only a few survive by hiding in a dense tenellus garden until they are too big to be eaten.

One of these fry, by now about 2/3 of an inch long, looks different (and eventually I will make a photo of it). It is basically all pale yellow, similar to my Gold Twin Bar Platy fry in another tank. It has the black bar across the caudal fin as the adults have, but some faint red edging on all other fins. I have seen the coloration on all my fry and there is no way that this one is the same.

So my question basically is: where does this one get its coloring from? Can it be that his/her grandparents were 2 different colorations of platies and the mix skipped one generation? If so, is that a rather common scenario, meaning does one have to consider a generation jump when purposely crossbreeding these fish (and maybe any other fish)?

Thanks in advance for your information and suggestions,

Ingo

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club

Pretty much spot on. Somewhere in her history is something that has either made the red colour fade, or that has kicked up a recessive colour.

Its something breeders pay attention to. It is difficult to tell the genotype of a fish without knowing its history (and even then, its hard to make a firm judgement as there are just some things we don't know yet) so we go off the phenotype until something like this happens that lets us know a bit about the genetic make-up.

If the mothers were still alive, you could try to work out who has passed this on to her by crossing fish from her line back to her possible parents They may all throw lighter fish because of her make-up, but its possible that two wouldn't and one would.

If you wanted to reproduce fish like her, you'd then to a whole bunch of controlled inbreeding to try to set the colour so that when you put two from that line together, they always throw that colour


[this is my somewhat limited understanding of genetics, so if i have fluffed something up, let me know!]


For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. - Terry Pratchett

Calla,

Thanks for the explanation, I understand what you mean. Somehow this is something that I haven’t considered when I thought about cross breeding my Twin Bar Platies with my Sunset Platies. I thought the first generation would be already a perfect mix. I should have paid better attention in Biology when we talked about Darwin’s theory .

As a thank you, and because I promised it in my first post, here are some pictures:

The Sunset parents in the tank (all born in there except an “old” male that is not directly related to them)

LITTLE_FISH attached this image:

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club

A picture of my lovely colored youngster (about half an inch long) that caused this thread.

LITTLE_FISH attached this image:

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club

Another picture of the same guy.

LITTLE_FISH attached this image:

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Proud Member of the New Jersey Aquatic Gardeners Club