i think my panda corys and my fat fake juli have bred. one or two of the panda babies look like they may have patterns on their bodies and tails

just keep them and love them like all the other fish you have

Culling now plays an important part of any breeder's scheme, and there are merits for culling (mostly phenotypically based).

However killing something when it is at a point where it is old enough to be ID'd just seems too harsh for my liking. There are better ways of isolating those fish from a breeding program than killing them.

Most breeders will select (hopefully carefully) breeding stock from which they choose to breed from. Culling their offspring would be very uncommon if the parent fish were of good quality to start with. This obviously varies from species to species. Fighters for example are the one species that many breeders will have to cull in large numbers - irrespective of how phenotypically great the parents are.

i think they look great =) and only happened as i needed a place for the female in the breeding tank lol. might see if they go well in my puffer tank

Thank you all for your comments and opinions, I think I will keep them and enjoy just as they are.

true hybrids are biological rubbish according to biologists. i'm not so sure myself.

I don't agree with those biologists. I think a lot of other biologists might be of the opinion that hybridising is part of nature as well. Widening the gene pool, adaptability, hybrid vigour and all that.

I think you're confusing natural selection with hybridisation. It is unlikely that separate species of fish occupying the same piece of water that haven't crossed in countless generations would suddenly cross-breed and form a "new species". Perhaps after an extreme event like a flood where two separate populations are suddenly mixed there is a slim chance that they might be compatible and cross breed, but the vast majority of the time its environmental factors [natural selection, survival of the fittest, call it what you like] that shape a species, not hybridisation. In fact its more often likely to be the opposite, where one species occupying a large area gradually becomes two different species due to different environmental factors or geographic isolation.

Unless you're talking about man-made hybrids, which would make up only a small portion of aquarium fish.

hybridisation and natural selectual are not mutually exclusive - natural selection act on hybridised animals too.

You have just described two methods of species evolution - it is not one or the other, but both.

geographical isolation works in reverse also.... and hybridisation can form new species too.

Hybridization, the interbreeding of species, provides favorable conditions for major and rapid evolution to occur. In birds it is widespread. Approximately one in ten species is known to hybridize, and the true global incidence is likely to be much higher. A longitudinal study of Darwin's finch populations on a Galápagos island shows that hybrids exhibit higher fitness than the parental species over several years

Floods, earthquakes, eruptions - all change geography and alter the course of rivers, streams and lakes. Fish that have the ability to hybridise have an evolutionary advantage.

well natural hybrids are something completely different to man made hybrids. and i suspect very rare. after all most platys in the trade are hybrids between Xiphophorus maculatus and Xiphophorus variatus BUT they were caught from the wild as one or the other and only hybridized when they wanted more colour forms. and platys are widely considered the easiest fish to hybridize.

Perhaps not so rare... who really knows?

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=49015

I wonder how many of the new species are could have developed thru hybridisation? Also with fish they are often classified as one species before academics decide they are another....

Think you could write a thesis on this subject and still you would never really know the true extent of it with fish in the wild.

But intentionally crossing a fish, and putting time and effort into it, or manipulating things purposefully is a different thing ethically than some cross-cory lovers IMO.

It makes me wonder that it might be more common with cory's in the wild than we think....