I have a question about cacatuoides triple red genetics

[Peter Lovett1]

I have a question about cacatuoides triple red genetics. First it may be best to give you some back ground on why I’m asking the question.
I got a shipment of some very nice yellow bodied wild cacs from Peru. However the fish where order for some one and they took all the stock i had other than one female I missed so i desided to cross her with a Triple red to see if i could get the yellow body into the domestic strange. The F1 population turned out to be very nice fish with a golden but not yellow body and some red spots in all the male offspring.
This led me to be leave that the yellow body gene was a hand shaking gene as in one gene make the body a dark yellow or orange and with too making the body yellow (Yellow and Orange are very special colours as adding black to yellow will make orange and white to orange will make yellow. These are the only colours that this happens too.).
I had assumed that the red spotting found in triple reds was recessive gene and did not expects to find any spotting at all on the F1 population. As the F1 pop did show a little spotting I assumed that the female was carry a gene for some red spotting? The thing I am confused about is that that the F2 population do not show any signs of spots at all
What I would like to know is if the spotting found on triple reds is just one gene or if there are many genes that code for spotting around the fins?

If any one would like to see the F1 Males please let me know.

 

[electric eel]

i'm curious too.i have fry from a yellow gold female and an orange male.i was told the yellow/gold gene was recessive.the biggest fry is approaching 1 and a half and looks lighter then the male but its a bit early to tell i think.iwas hoping to get some yellow golds if i crossed these fry back together.i was unable to get any yellow/gold males initially.i've found with angelfish very few genes are completely dominant but almost always interact to modify appearance in some way.

 

[dw1305]

Apistogramma genetics

Hi all,
Peter, I'd be very interested in the photo of the F1 males. I'm not sure about the genetics of colour in Apistogramma. I couldn't find much in the literature, although there are papers on the Rift Valley Lake cichlids.

The people who might know would be at the University of Hull:
<http://www.hull.ac.uk/evolution/people/domino_joyce/index.html>

I've got a copy of the only one I could find:
READY, J. S. *,+; SAMPAIO, I. ++; SCHNEIDER, H. ++; VINSON, C. ++; DOS SANTOS, T. ++; TURNER, G. F. +

"Colour forms of Amazonian cichlid fish represent reproductively isolated species." Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 19(4):1139-1148, July 2006.

Which has some details, PM me if you want a copy.

cheers Darrel

 

[ed seeley]

Hi all,
Peter, I'd be very interested in the photo of the F1 males. I'm not sure about the genetics of colour in Apistogramma. I couldn't find much in the literature, although there are papers on the Rift Valley Lake cichlids.

The people who might know would be at the University of Hull:
<http://www.hull.ac.uk/evolution/people/domino_joyce/index.html>

I've got a copy of the only one I could find:
READY, J. S. *,+; SAMPAIO, I. ++; SCHNEIDER, H. ++; VINSON, C. ++; DOS SANTOS, T. ++; TURNER, G. F. +

"Colour forms of Amazonian cichlid fish represent reproductively isolated species." Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 19(4):1139-1148, July 2006.

Which has some details, PM me if you want a copy.

cheers Darrel

That paper (if it's the same one Im thinking of) is more about the role of colour in speciation rather than the inheritence of colours in captively bred forms. Not sure it'll help too much.

Hull might be able to offer some ideas but when I was at York their work certainly used to centre around Haplochromine fish and the heritability of different factors even in closely related species or different factors in the same species can be totally different. As a totally different clan of the Cichlidae they could be completely different.

I think (and it is nothing more than a thought) that this is simply a multigene factor that is variable so that you have to select for spots. I.E. they will tend to have offspring that have a range of spots but spottier fish will generally have spottier young. If you select the spottiest fish you should be able to get the amount of spots higher.

However this goes against the idea of you getting no spots in the F2 generation. Will put my thinking cap on for other genes that work like that and let you know.

 

[Peter Lovett1]

Here are too photos of F1 males

As you can see there is some variation in the spotting in each male.

The secound photo is the father of the F2 pop population. The first is the father of a brood of F1xTriple red from a diffrent strain.

The F2 fry are still small and may show some spots as they get older but the new F1 that i have of the same age show spots already.

It looks like i may have an intresting project and to be honest the F1s are better than i could ever of hoped for. I exspect the F2 popultion to be more yellow like the wild fish but we will have to wait and see there is also the possiblilty that all the F2s are female.

 

[electric eel]

i pulled the fry from my orange male to yellow gold cacautoides female today.things have been a little crazy lately so i did'nt pull the 60 or so odd fry when she spawned.i was told that the gold trait was recessive so all i really wanted was a couple pairs to cross back together.i ended up with 18 fry with most all of them looking rather like the dad but there is one that is really light(looks nothing like the others)looks like i should have pulled all 60 fry to get my breeders(my goal was yellow/gold with bright orange fins) evidently the gene can't be totally recessive.surely someone out there has first hand experience with selective breeding of cacautoides.i am curious.

 

[Apistomaster]

Here what I got from crossing a xanthanistic, Gold-white female Apistogramma cacatuoides X normal Triple Red.

 

[electric eel]

i like the look of those fish(and i'm really not a big fan of triple reds).i like to experiment.i don't drink etc any more(since i've had children) and it keeps me amused.my little lighter female must have just been stressed because now she is much closer to the color of the others.suprisingly they have more orange on the fins .the dad just the dorsal and caudal but on the offspring all their fins are bright orange.i've done quite a bit of selective breeding with rams but it is frustrating.i came up with some that all the fins are red(not the reddish orange color but red.i've since outcrossed them and to my dismay the offspring are'nt nearly as pretty as either line.the line i crossed into them is huge.biggest rams i have seen.i guess i will have to cross the offspring back together.i hope it does'nt take too many generations to get back to where i was.hoping some of the f1 crosses will look like my original line and then i will go from there.hate to inbreed too much.thanks for posting the pic's.do you have any of whites that you would part with?

 

[Apistomaster]

It was my intention to breed siblings from the above fish in hopes of getting 25% white-gold cacatuoides but despite the fact that I raised 174 from that cross I never did get any of them to breed for me. Some bred for those who bought them but no one reported raising any fry. I found this last time to be very frustrating as the fish I raised were healthy enough but uncooperative as breeders. They grew to be very large specimens, almost pushing the boundaries of a Dwarf Cichlid.
I used to consider A. cacatuoides a sure thing but in recent years I have found them to be problematic for me to breed. Therefore I stopped recommending them as a beginner's Apistogramma in favor of A. trifasciata and A. borelli.
I used to set up random pairs of cacatuoides, like 3 pairs in their own tanks and have all 3 pairs spawn within 48 hours. Now it is like pulling teeth to get them to spawn for me. They also seem to be short lived and faster growing. If I don't spawn them at a relatively young age they seem to loose all interest in breeding.

 

[electric eel]

i'm pretty new to apisto's but i read that a lot of the tank bred cacautoides were harder to breed then wild ones.i know from experience that a lot of the really inbred strains of angelfish are very difficult to deal with.i'm hoping to get 25% yellow golds from my cacautoides juvies when i cross(if they will cooperate) them back together.i never see anything but triple reds around here.

 

[Apistomaster]

Hi Electric Eel,
That was my intention as well and I am still a little incredulous that with over 70 pairs I never got a single spawn.

I did find it interesting to see how the Gold-white female genes modified the expression of the triple red and generally produced a lighter colored body although that was not due to her Gold-white gene but came from whatever strain the Gold-white strain originated from. Perhaps Orange Flashes?
I'll never know. I did see what I think was a form of hybrid vigor where the fish grew larger and very fast compared to what I have become used to.
I expected the out-crossing would have strengthened the fish and I especially hoped I would see that in the expected 25% F2 that manifested the Gold-white phenotype. Things don't always go the way one might expect though.