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Line Breed


Johannes Visser

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Line Breeding

Line Breeding Fish

The first few sites in each of those links have some useful information.

Line breeding is when two related fish are mated together to promote certain traits. (Line breeding can therefore in a way be said to be a specific form of .)

:)

So line bred fish are then not hybrids ! :bow: could one say selective bred fish is man made !

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good links david

line breeding can be done to fix a colour strain or if you have no other fish of that species to breed with

usually mother to son or father to daughter, then grandfather to granddaughter etc.

or siblings together

if you have on ly one male and several females

you breed with one female then use male offspring to breed to the other available females

lines need to be kept seperate to ensure as much diversity as possible

watch for increases in deformities or weakness in young or lowering of fertility

if it works its called line breeding, if it doesn't work its called inbreeding :D

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http://www.cichlidforum.com/profiles/sp ... hp?id=1377

http://www.cichlidforum.com/profiles/sp ... hp?id=1313

I guess an issue with fishstock here is understanding what line you are breeding. If you're talking Africans. With the origin unsure, in terms of colour or location variants- you're breeding based on the fish itself rather than the known traits of a known line. We probably have more chance of confusing the line with 'inter variant' breeding.

So it's a bit of a blind line isn't it

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from what i have read about e yellows, every e yellow in the hobby is a line breed fish. the story goes something like, only 10 were taken from the lake in the 70's as there were roughly only 250 yellows in the entire lake & hobby supply has come from them. I must say that my yellows have breed the youngest & have certainly breed the most out of all of my africans. must have been from years of practise.

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my memory is not perfect but here's part of the article:

L. caeruleus was first identified in 1956 by G. Fryer. He described this fish as normally being white, with a black stripe through the dorsal fin, which would become a pale blue cast in breeding males (probably the morph from Nkhata Bay, Malawi). Believe it or not, this species was named caeruleus (meaning "blue" in Latin) for this very reason. It wasn't until around 1980 that this xanthic color variant was discovered by Stuart Grant and his divers. Grant et. al supposedly discovered a small colony of "Electric Yellows" at Lion's Cove, Malawi.

Stuart Grant only collected a few specimens, but refused to mass-collect and export them because of the population's small numbers, fearing that they would be pushed into extinction. Then two Swedish collectors paying a visit to Stuart Grant noticed these beautiful, bright yellow mbuna in his tanks and requested that he collect and export some for them. The story is that when he declined, these two Swedes bribed some of his divers, who knew right where they were located. They then returned to Sweden with two yellow labs, unbeknownst to Grant

From what I have read, these two yellow labs were then given as a gift to Pierre Brichard, who was very impressed by them. This is where the story gets really interesting: Brichard then took them back to his fishing operation in Burundi, along Lake Tanganyika (of all places!) and bred some 20,000 fish, all related to that pair. Quite amazing. And he did this in less than six years time. Then, in 1986 he made them available to the public, selling them for a hefty price from what I hear. Brichard ended up making a good dollar off that pair, while Stuart Grant on Lake Malawi, who found the fish in the first place, was left holding the bag.

The story of the yellow lab doesn't end here, my friends. When Brichard put his yellow labs on the market in 1986, he called them "Labidochromis tanganicae", which caused immense confusion among hobbyists. Was this a Tanganyikan Labidocrhomis species, or had Brichard collected this "new" Labidochromis from Malawi and raised it in his ponds on Lake Tanganyika? Eventually the issue was settled, but it did cause quite a commotion. And to think, that most yellow labs in the hobby all descended from that single, illicit pair.

Stuart did capture 22 fish later on but had a bit of a spill and only a few were left. These were given to Gary Kratchovil in San Antonio, TX. You'll see him offer F1 stock from time to time. A couple of years ago, a friend of a friend bought some F1 yellow labs that had been pond-raised in Africa. Surprisingly, they were no better in quality than other good yellow labs that we have seen! There are plenty of bad strains out there - some with lots of black on the body and face. There is a morph with a whitish belly that is not as attractive. Don't be mislead into thinking that is a man-made strain. This is a naturally occurring morph that comes from Lion's Cove, along side the yellow lab we all know

link to full article: http://www.cichlidforum.com/articles/l_caeruleus.php

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thanks for that smidey

this is not the only example of breeding from a very limited gene pool of animals

so long as the originals were strong genetically many generations can be bred off them with no problems

all the white tigers in the world come off 1 wild specimen

man has mucked them up by inbreeding too much to ensure they get the white ones, worth more

also have hybridised the bengal with siberian

as a consequence it is hard to find a pure strain of these nowadays

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lol what fish ? and yea it will take many generations , and picking the best ones from each batch of offspring

Tang of some sort ! Will spoil the fun if I say :wink: wont have to go far generations wise to get what I want :D The hardest part is all ready done !

Thanks for all the info much appreciated ! Once this mission has been accomplished I will post progress and pic's :wink:

Lynn

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