'Man-made fish' your view?

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.
 
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.
 
[tangent]
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.
[/tangent]

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

:D
 
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).
 
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