Apisto fry, missing ventrals?

[Jordan]

Hey all! I have a bunch of orange flash fry, some are deformed (face shape, crooked tails) I’ve started to notice a decent number also have ventral fins that look as though they have been bitten off, or never developed although I’m not sure this is the case as both parents had perfectly fine ventrals.

I have attached a photo of one such fry, they will be 5 months in 2 days.

Has anyone had experience with this?
Thanks for any feedback.

 

[mantisfan101]

Did you feed them lots of micro worms? With betta fry feeding mostly micro worms can lead them to losing ventrals. This is so because microworms tend to sink so fry need to slide around on the bottom of the tank in irder to feed, which will eventually almost “rub” off their ventrals. I have no idea if this is applicable to apistogramma fry tho.

 

[Mike Wise]

Your description points to a highly inbred strain. If they were my fish I would euthanize the deformed specimens and find other Orange Flash specimen to out-cross with your remaining fish - and then continue to cull as deformed fish appear. Of course, you want to get your new stock from another source.

 

[Jordan]

Did you feed them lots of micro worms? With betta fry feeding mostly micro worms can lead them to losing ventrals. This is so because microworms tend to sink so fry need to slide around on the bottom of the tank in irder to feed, which will eventually almost “rub” off their ventrals. I have no idea if this is applicable to apistogramma fry tho.

No micro worms but they did spend a significant amount of time near the bottom, I read the same thing about Berta’s so I thought it’s a possibility here too.

 

[Jordan]

Did you feed them lots of micro worms? With betta fry feeding mostly micro worms can lead them to losing ventrals. This is so because microworms tend to sink so fry need to slide around on the bottom of the tank in irder to feed, which will eventually almost “rub” off their ventrals. I have no idea if this is applicable to apistogramma fry tho.

No micro worms but they did spend a significant amount of time near the bottom, I read the same thing about Berta’s so I thought it’s a possibility here too.

 

[Jordan]

Your description points to a highly inbred strain. If they were my fish I would euthanize the deformed specimens and find other Orange Flash specimen to out-cross with your remaining fish - and then continue to cull as deformed fish appear. Of course, you want to get your new stock from another source.

the father of this specific bunch of fry has since passed on, I have bred the female with others and fry are fine so I’m thinking the genetic defects came from his side. To be honest I’m thinking of culling the lot except a few females as it seems 100% of the males are deformed but a good number of the females are perfectly fine, I don’t want to release bad genes into the hobby as these were meant to go to a distributor here in New Zealand.
I think I’ll contact them and ask if they will wait for my pentacle red fry to grow up a bit more and I’ll send those in place of these.