Question regarding mutants, hybrids, and why people hate hybrids

[jm1212]

i dont have any problem with fish like blood parrots, because i look at it from their point of view. it is not there fault for one second that they are hybrids, so do not condem them for it. it was the people that made them and brought them into the markets fault.
i acctually have a blood parrot, and he acts like any other fish, and i treat him just like any of my other fish in the tank with him. he can swim just as fast as the others, and he can compete for food just as good too.

OBTW, there are plenty of natural hybrids among animals that have arisen in certain per trades because trappers/ catchers brought them in, and they are wild. for example, blue and gold macaws ans scarlet macaws will brred ocasionally to produce ofspring that lead normal lives except for the fact that they cannot breed. another example is the green wing scarlet macaw hybrid that occurs all of the time in the wild. i wouldnt doubt that somehwere along the line at leat a few cichlid from wother psecies bred to produce a hybrid, whether it be angels and discus or sword tails and platies (whic does happen in the wild from what i have read. it results in the varatius).

 

[RISK2123]

is it true that if you breed two EBJD's you wont necassarily get EBJD fry?

 

[TastierWay]

If EBJD is a recessive gene, you would have to get EBJD fry. tt and tt make tt. If you bred an EBJD with a non EBJD, then you'd have the chance of getting Tt Tt tt tt. There's a 50% chance 50% of the fry would be EBJD.

 

[RISK2123]

If EBJD is a recessive gene, you would have to get EBJD fry. tt and tt make tt. If you bred an EBJD with a non EBJD, then you'd have the chance of getting Tt Tt tt tt. There's a 50% chance 50% of the fry would be EBJD.

so if both parents are EBJD all fry will be the same? thats what i figured but a pretty informed guy at my lfs told me differently. thanks for the clear up!!

 

[TastierWay]

Get it cleared by someone else before you decide what to do. I was looking into breeding piebald pythons and this helped a lot. Not sure if it's the same with fish.

 

[jm1212]

to add to you post, many of the blood parrot females are fertile, and all males were not until a while ago, when fertile males started showing up. it is a small percentile, like 0.1 percent of males, but then again, that number can grow quickly, for if a fertile male has children with a fertile female by chance, his ofspring will be fertile, and then their children will be fertile, so on and so forth.

 

[gagaliya]

if on the other hand, hybrid fish are introduced into the hobby, then the gene pool is affected .. negatively.

ok maybe i am dense, but you still didnt say why the gene pool is affected negatively? If i crossbreed some cichlid for example, and give the offsprings to a lfs which in turn sell it to some fishkeeper for their aquariums, what's the big deal? is it purely because it's more difficult to identify the fish?

it's a given not to reintroduce ANYTHING back into the wild from a closed system, so that's a nonissue, same goes for fish mutilation / painting etc.

 

[SnakeIce]

it becomes a problem because without documentation of that hybrid*, those fish get passed off as pure species to those that do care about keeping pure species. I don't buy large expencive cichlids so I don't have the problem of spending 20-100$ on a fish I thought was pure that turns out isn't even though it was presented as such.

I don't mind documented hybrids. Make it clear what they are and I don't have a problem. But most sources of hybrids do not make that clear or the hybrid label is lost somewere down the line. That I have a huge problem with.

*(hybrid means crossing two species, which a mutt dog is not nor is a brangus the result of two species)

 

[coupedefleur]

With mutt dogs you're crossing two varieties of the same species. While I don't mind mutts, I do find the creation of new "market" breeds like schnoodles kind of distasteful! Some of them seem to be driven by the desire for a cute name. Ugh!

The same has been going on with horses- with them there's a real danger of losing some of the draft breeds because draft crosses are "hot" in dressage right now. With horses, though, we have the classic useful hybrid- the MULE!

Some inter-species hybrids are fertile for a few generations, then crash. That's probably one of the things behind a lot of the anti-hybrid feeling. The Lake Victoria disaster and the desire to preserve as many species as possible is another reason. The killie and especially livebearer segments of the hobby used to have avid hybridizers, but now the pendulum has swung the other way. Again, lots of these fish have small ranges and it doesn't take much to drive them to extinction.

As an aquarist, I would be really mad if I got fish with the intention of breeding them, only to find they were sterile hybrids!

That said, almost any platy, swordtail, or molly you see in a store is an inter-species hybrid!

 

[Yoemen]

heh yeah, while we refer to crossbreeding cattle as producing hybrids technically it isn't. However, we hybridise the heck out of our crops.

I don't know, I guess I am just not the type that is gonna go into a store and buy something without looking into it(ANYMORE). If I saw some strange new fish in my LFS I would want to check it out before I bought it.

I saw a slew of peacocks at this LFS I checked out yesterday, and I figure some of them were probably hybrids. I have never seen that many different peacocks.

Course they also had the largest clown knife fish I have ever seen for $60.