ive had the odd whites in some batches and never lost them.
what i have found if they are born yellow then start turning white you loose them.
heres a pick of a mixed bunch notice the whites.

Yeah, i too have found the odd white one in my batches, but they either turn yellow or die so i suspect its not a strong genotype. its like an albino albino

Hi Doug, I have been reading this with great interest, just wondered if you could tell me out of curiosity the ratio of albinos to commons you might expect from breeding 2 commons that both have the albino gene available to pass on to their fry?

Cheers
James

well, its hard to say.

If you take the simplest explanation that there is two types of colour (albino and common) and common is dominant over albino then you would expect 75% common and 25% albino if both parents had the albino gene. if only one parent had the albino gene then they would all be common.

The thing is that it doesnt seem to be this simple. thats why i am trying to get together all the info i can on the issue so i can start to pull it apart.

off to the shop i reckon

I just took down 120 to local shops, had like 15 bags in the car

Hi everyone, here is an odd update on my Brown male sf and my Albino female sf cross.

The first batch was a 50/50 split

The second batch was more of a 60/40 split more browns than albinos but lost all but 12 or so albinos due to a water change when we had temps in the upper 90's changed the water 4 degree temp drop sent all fry into shock.

The third batch that is now leaving the cave is more of a 70/30 split with more browns than albinos.

Is there a reason for this? If I let them spawn a few more times will they be all brown breeding the albino gene right out of them? Every spawn more browns less albinos. I'm gonna let them breed one more time just to see what happens.

The whiter ones dying sort of explains why my albino died!
I got an albino from the pet store but when I got some more from somewhere else.. I noticed he was ALOT paler than the rest.... then he died =/

Thankfully, ive not lost any others! And I won't be going back there again.. they arnt my favourite pet store to be fair anyway, they don't know what most fish are :S

keep those crossing counts coming guys, getting some good info here

As requested Doug..

When I bread a calico male with different common females i thought, to start with, that I had all common's, however, about 2 weeks later the gold / orange started to develop in some of them. I know for sure that the females I had had albino genes but I didn't get any albinos in 3 batches! But then when he finally bread with the calico female I had about 50 calico's and only 5 albino's...

Gee this gene pool thing gets confusing!! Lol..!!

Cheers mate!

Very interesting topic, but sorry to side track abit. I am just confused about the type 1,2,3 albino. Anyway, I bred 2 albino and all the 11 batches turned out albino fry, can I say, they are type 3 albino, cos I suspect the 2 albino adults are siblings, cos I bought them from the same source, though bought at different timing. I also noticed some of the fry do not hv the spot, its difficult to know the percentage.

And what will happen if these fry grow up and inbreed again. I read somewhere in this forum that says its not advisable to inbred cos of the weak gene. By weak gene, do I understand as, they will die more easily? or will they turn out deformed? Sorry if I ask stupid question, I am totally hopeless when genetics are concerned.

Hi all,

If i cross breed or at least i try Ancistrus tamboensis with L144's Black eyed Lemon Ancistrus what will the fry be?

breeding siblings is a massive NO NO!

Professional breeders never inbreed unless they are after a specific trait and even then is never sibling crosses, at most it is a 1/8 inbreeding (cousins). The reason that you shouldn't breed them is that genetic strength comes from genetic diversity and inbreeding reduces genetic diversity by 1/2 each time you do it. Most aquarium fish are already horribly inbred so as breeders we should activly try to reverse this trend. I personally have aquired breeders from Vic, NSW, WA and locally so i am fairly sure that i dont have any inbreeding.

The results of inbreeding may become apparent immedialty or take some time to manifest. usually you see extremely high mortality in the young fry however, sometimes it can take months for a defect to become apparent (usually when they begin to mature). Long and the short of it is...DON"T INBREED ANYTHING!!!! You wouldn't sleep with your sibling so why would you make your pet fish!

In terms of the albino types. This is still under debate. Some believe that there is more than one albino gene while others believe that there is an albino gene and a white/yellow gene. while others believe that there is only one albino gene. The simple fact is we dont know. thats why we are trying to figure out whats going on with this thread.

Migdem: I'm not sure. It depends on many things. Its assumed that the yellow colour is resesive to the dark colour so if the dark one is pure bred then the fry will be all dark but if he also carries the albino gene then you might get different fry. Its hard to tell if they will breed though, as they are techniclly different species. It depends how different they are, species wise, as a lot of the different birstlenose species do hybridize.