In response to eliminating blue offspring, since the “blue” is recessive to dragon blood, the simplest way to eliminate the blue allele is to test mate your dragon blood breeders by mating them to non-dragon bloods. I can provide the results that would prove whether the alleles are identical or not if you like.
The resulting fish could answer the question if dragon blood and “red” are identical alleles. It could also be done by creating F1 Red Zebra x any Aulonocara (non-dragon blood) and F1 Dragon Blood x any Aulonocara (again, non-dragon blood). Then from the F1s produce F2s and F3s to see what gene segregation occurs. Simply do a number of reciprocal crosses of Dragon Bloods and Red Zebras. So, it is certainly possible the allele controlling “dragon blood” background color is the same allele controlling the “red” of Red Zebras. If you mate a Red Zebra to another Lake Malawi cichlid, the F1 will be “red.” The F2 will generally be 3/4 “red” and 1/4 non-“red.” This is, as I’ve discovered via test matings, also the situation in Dragon Bloods. It is true that the “red” of Red Zebras is a dominant allele (to the normal background color). There are disputes about the origin of dragon blood. Also, I wonder what the dragon blood pattern would look like on an OB color pattern. Knowing this can help me build dragon blood breeding colony with only homozygous gold males that would produce 100% dragon bloods. If I get 100% gold offspring from a mating, then I know that male is homozygous. I’ll also mate dragon blood males to OB peacock females. By the way, they are very attractive fish in their own right. I’ll mate greys together to see if I get only greys. While I’m certain (relatively) I’m correct about the dragon blood genetics, I’m going to set up some test crosses to prove it. This phenomenon happens with not only cichlids, but also livebearers, rainbowfishes, barbs, and tetras. If there are large numbers of fry, the adults seem to become inured with them and cease to think of them as food. I speculate that has to do with fewer fry being produced. The original breeding colony was small and for some reason it seems small breeding colonies tend to be more cannibalistic. So, why so many greys the first time around? I think my predation theory holds up. I also could tell from the numbers that at least one male in each breeding carried the recessive grey. The relatively low numbers of grey fish indicates that most of our breeders were homozygous and all of their offspring would be gold. That is more like what you’d expect if gold was not a homozygous dominant. When we processed the two breeding colonies we got a 6.5:1 ratio of gold to grey. Even if gold was a homozygous lethal, then something else had to be going on. I was skeptical about this because that would lead to a 2:1 ratio of gold to grey and we’d gotten closer to 1:1. Another reason could be that the gold dominant is lethal when homozygous, meaning when a fish inherits two copies of gold it dies. First, it’s possible the gold fry aren’t as good at avoiding predation and got eaten more frequently. A couple of things could have happened to explain this anomaly. Even if all the original fish carried the grey recessive, you’d expect a 3:1 ratio of gold to grey. The next thing that occurred to me is that an almost 1:1 ration of gold to grey was unusual. The appearance of grey fish from gold parents meant gold was dominant to grey and that at least some of the original fish carried the recessive grey. Why is this? Well, if it were recessive, then there would have only been gold bodied fish. The first thing to occur to me is that the gold body has to be dominant over the normal grey. The juveniles were split into dragon blood and non-gold dragon blood as I called the grey bodied fish. The breeders were placed into 300 gallon cichlid breeding vats. Creatively enough, I called them red dragon bloods and blue dragon bloods respectively. After adding mature females from the offspring, I split the breeding colony into two, one with red males and one with blue males. I was puzzled at the time about the genetics of this color strain as I’ll discuss below. The purplish-pink (red) ones like the photo and some that were powder blue instead of purplish-pink. Among the gold bodied fish we found two types of males. Interestingly enough, when we processed them we found about half the fish were grey bodied instead of gold. We grew the fish to maturity and set them up for breeding. The photo shows a typical male of this strain. This is a strain we got from in November 2012. Photo is of a Dragon Blood Peacock Cichlid male, one of our breeders.Ī while back, we processed two breeding vats of dragon blood peacocks.
0 kommentar(er)
