'Man-made fish' your view?

[Roland]

I am hoping I can have your opinions on the delicate subject of 'manufactured' fish ie the blood parrot cichlid and more recently the flowerhorn cichlid.

For those of you who dont know, both these fish are hybrids, a cross between fish of differing species.

The blood parrot cichlid is an odd looking fish, with various problems with areas such as the mouth and the swimbladder. it also has trouble breeding, but apparently successes are becoming more frequent.

The flowerhorn is less 'unusual' looking, and breeding this fish is reported to be relitlavley easy, with the offspring fertile, which raises its own questions....

What are your views on this? I have my own views but would like to hear what others think first.

thanks for your time!

Also, the reason I have posted this on Gen freshwater is because I feel this has more to do with ethics than of the fish being cichlids...

[demon_surfer]

i honestly dont care about the genetics of the situation. i dont like the fact that they dye the blood parrots ( they are very much beautiful enough as it is) it is a cruel way to go and i dont see how it cant affect the fish in a bad way.

i have one blood parrot at the moment in a 55 gallon community tank. he gets on great with everything and has the most personality in the whole tank. he does have problems getting food floating on the surface because of the odd shape of his mouth but is fine when the food is sinking. Since most of the neons get the sinking food ive taken to hand feeding him.

some people may say it is unatural to breed these fish with diffrent species and make new ones, but isnt that evolution? so long as the new species dont endanger the old ones. such as pushing the old ones out of their natural habitat i see nothing wrong with the practice.

[OrionGirl]

Just to prevent some silliness...Contrived creatures are not part of evolution. Evolution is the adaptation of a SPECIES to survive a changing environment. It is NOT hybridized, crippled creatures made for purely economic reasons. Parrots wouldn't survive in any native waters--they would be eaten or starve.

Best response I can give as to their existance is : Not in my tank. I don't even like colored gravels and fake plants.

[demon_surfer]

i didnt mean that evolution and the selective breeding are that closely related, just that they share some similar properties. ie combining two fish to create a new one with diffrent attributes.

The blood parrots probably would not do to well in the wild, i think, because of the trouble they have with feeding that i have seen in them.

im thinking hard how to talk about this with out sparking a h00ge arguement. oriongirl seems very passionate on the subject.:eek:

bah i cant hmm :/ i just look on them as an intresting new fish, not as something fake....oh well hehe

[JVal]

I find BP's to be rather interesting fish. Wether it was right or wrong for them to be created, I'm in the middle on that. I don't think hybrids, fish or otherwise, are for all people. I suppose you must look at the quality of life the fish will have, its form, needs. Then be selective as to which individuals continue the "new specie". Heck someone already played god, as some would say, why not try to improve it.
One of my 55g's has 4 of them living peacefully and growing nicely. 2 of them can close their mouths, the other 2 can not. None of them have the dramatically indented area just posterior to the head. They haven't had any problems with their swim bladders. Also none of them had been painted. That is an issue I definately do not agree with.
My first pair did reproduce with live fry as the result. That was several years ago. I'm still trying to find another pair that will reproduce as well. While looking I came to realize that good specimens are difficult to find.
I know nothing about the Flowerhorn other than having seen a picture. It's not a fish that appeals to me.

[VoodooChild]

Bad news all around. I take care of them well at work, mostly cause I feel sorry for them, but I would never let one near my tanks.

[OrionGirl]

Not trying to start a fight--just said I don't want them in my tank. I'm not particularly passionate one way or another about hybrids and such. I am passionate about the misuse of technical terminology, since it is misleading in so many ways.

Selective breeding has nothing in common with evolution. Evolution ends up with a critter that it better able to survive it's habitat. Selective breeding has cull in pretty much every batch. There's no way to compare 'methods'--evolution doesn't try to make the genetic freaks survive and spread. The driving force between evolution and selective breeding is totally different.

Not to mention, selective breeding refers to specifically breeding a critter to encourage or enhance a specific native characteristic, such as flowing fins, or a specific color. Hybridizing fish is not really the same thing as selective breeding.

[agilis]

I agree 100% with every point made by Oriongirl. The only fish worth keeping in my opinion are those that are essentially indistinguishable from a wild fish. Some of those Frankenfish give me the creeps. The most ordinary wild guppy has a beauty that exceeds any veiltailed unnaturally colored malformed genetic mutation.

I agree about the colored gravel too. It's all a matter of taste, I suppose, but for me the magic of any aquarium is in the replication of some part of the natural world.

[goldfries]

being someone who's from the place where the LHs are from, i see many many many many LH and personally i find it's spoiling fish trades.

nowadays LFS carry LH and LH alone, nothing else. only a few shops carry other species but 50 - 90% will be LH. but most shops are 100% LH.

sad huh? sad. :(

[fish dude]

my lfs has TONS of blood parrots and i like them

[andruboz]

i bought a blood parrot before i bought any other cichlid. mostly because the store said it was not aggressive. which wasnt totally true. the bigger one pushed around the smaller one. but i consider it a 'gateway'or stepping stone cichlid. if i hadnt got this one[and later another], and learned more about it, i might not have gotten interested in other cichlids. i might have stayed in tetras and mollies and catfish, thinking cichlids were too delicate or complicated or sensitive or something.

[goldfries]

on the bright side, BP are bad at biting. bad side for the fish.

[charlotte-n-NC]

I agree with andruboz. When I first saw the "jelly bean" parrots in the store, I thought I had to have some. Purple, blue, green, all colors under the sun. Had no idea at the time they were hybrids or injected. They just looked really awsome in the tank. After doing some research, I decided not to get them. I dont knock any one for owning them.
Flowerhorns are beautiful fish. Some look kind of creepy though. Saw some on an auction site selling for thousands. Red eyes, wild colors, some just look more "manufactored" than others.
I chose green terrors because of their spectacular colors and personality.

[Faramir]

evolution does sometimes proceed by hybridisation. The only difference between natural evolution and selective breeding is that in the latter the selection pressure is artificial.


I'm not keen on man-made fish. My approach is a very natural one - I prefer wild coloured swordtails and mollies to the .. erm .. exotic selectively bred forms, for example. This is a matter of my approach to the hobby.

I saw some Flowerhorns at the Goldfish Bowl in Oxford the other week, and the main thought I had was "Man, these things are expensive!"

I can think of a number of genuine species I find more attractive, including the good old acaras and firemouths, quite frankly.

Just a matter of personal taste.

[Roland]

I pretty much agree with oriongirl on hybrids, and wouldnt have them in my tank. in the case of the BP, should these fish ever have existed in the wild, they would be wiped out and extinct very quickley. Not so much seems to have been mentioned about the flowerhorn, but with over 2000 species of cichlids in the wild, why bother keeping them?

On the subject of selective breeding, agilis hit the nail on the head about wild guppies. I saw them in thailand, in water features, (of which there are many) outside shops and houses, to keep the mozzy larvae pop down. Very quickley its apparent that these fish arevibrant, full of life and beautiful, unlike the inbred zombie fish that frequent many LFS.

But Ive even heard that the wild caught betta spendens now has longer, flowing fins, than it did 30 years ago. Obviously the long finned 'domestic' variety has been rereleases to the wild over the years. It just shows that the results of selective breeding can be far reaching.

To put it simply, I think people shouldnt think whether they COULD, but rather whether they SHOULD.

[RyJ]

It is kinda sad.....but the general public looks at these 'man-made' fish and thinks....hmm, good, SOMETHING interesting!!

I work in a pet store and one of the biggest complaints is that way too many of the freshwater fish are boring. Our store sells WAY more of the fish that are selective breed than the fish that aren't.

Whenever we get Parrot Fish in they sell like mad.

There is a very very high demand for these mutations. Ppl really don't care how they were created. Our store actually offers a lot of info on the fish we sell...so when a customer looks at a Bubble-eye Goldfish and learns that this fish only looks like this b/c of selective breeding, a lot of them wonder why the Zebra Danios, or the Black Shirt Tetras, or the Harlequin Rasboras still look boring....

Ppl really like their colours....

[punch]

I had a blood parrot that I realy liked. Lots of personality and
almost like a dog! He was pretty big at 8".
When I got him I didn't relize he was a hybred. When I did I named him the mutant *******. I believe someone on a forum called him that. But....... I don't like the practice of hybreds, and
dyeing even less (mine wasn't dyed) There are so many
beuatiful great fish to chose from I see no need to "manufacter"
them.


WHAT? ******* is a bad word? I wasn't calling anyone a *******. Well... a fish but still. a ******* is an ilegitamate child(sp)
nothing more. Help us from the word police.

[Faramir]

If you want to use a naughty word, I often find that English ones not used in the US will get through.

:D

[Ger]

But isn't there a difference between a hybrid and a new strain? I would think that allowing, say, a Boesman Rainbow and a plain-jane Australian Rainbow to interbreed would be a contamination of the gene pool and such proliferation would render blue-blooded Boesman's rare throughout the hobby. Perhaps an extreme example, but not something that I am comfortable with. Now, the creation of a new variety of fish, which I presumed this thread was about when I initially read it (not a knock towards its direction, just my initial perception), is a whole different ball-game. Just to reiterate an anology to the dogs -- Let's say Shih Tzu. They had been bred for aesthetics and size, and they breed true. I suppose that history has established that there is nothing wrong with creating a companion animal that would have a hard time surviving in the wild. Do parrot fish breed true? (Supposedly may not be sterile, but I don't know either way).

In short, if there is a market for a new variety of 'severum/midas/whatever' cichlid that breeds true then I am more apt to embrace it rather than some AxB mutt (for dogs I prefer mutts... go figure).