[Guest]

ok so i was talking to a guy at a well known respected online breeder and what he said was that breeding fish that are brothers and sisters isnt good for the strain.. that you can get away with it a few times but that if you do it too much the fish start to lose their color and be garbage. now i know this how most hobbyists sell there fish. he said that you should try to crossbreed if you know they are siblings. try to get some fish of the same species from someone else and trade a few. so my question is this how do we know if the fish that us hobbyists get from whatever source we get them from are brothers and sisters? because if we buy f1 fry or juvies raise them out those are probly brother/sister unless the person who bred them has a ton of them. Then theres those rare tanganyikans or rare haps that are only brought into the states in small numbers and everyone wants to spred them by the offspring of a small group. how will inbreeding affect this line down the road?

 

[Fogelhund]

I am sure that the breeder is respected and knowledgeable in most aspects of keeping fish. Unfortunately they are dead wrong on this one.

 

[Number6]

m1ke715m
I used to believe that, was taught it as a child and even passed it along back in the day... turns out that it is false and could actually result in the very garbage you are trying to avoid.
Have a read here:
http://www.cichlid-forum.com/phpBB/view ... p?t=228195

Inbreeding depression is real... so is outbreeding depression and you can't avoid messing up a bloodline as simply as your well respected breeder thinks you can! :thumb:

 

[ktaylor]

ooh! i love genetics discussion. inbreeding is the fastest way to lock 'type', or the characteristics of your line.

i am a dog breeder, and for most of us, inbreeding is sib to sib, parent to offspring, half-sib to half-sib. beyond this, it would be considered a linebreeding (common ancestors somewhere before the 5th generation). Some breedings considered outcrosses may really be distant (beyond g5) linebreeding. This distant linebreeding is a good way to gain so-called 'hybrid vigor', and yet keep many of the characteristics your inbred line contains. With a true outcross, nothing will be predictable, and the offspring will likely show a wide range of the parents' characteristics ( no uniformity).

still a newbie to cichlid breeding ( have my first clutch of yellow lab fry), but i will keep the best and cull the rest. the best will eventually go back with the original adults, and i'll see what happens. happily, fish generations are a lot shorter than dog generations, but i must say it's easier to choose my female dog's breeding partner than hope the right fish pair up.

 

[toume]

Fish don't have the inbreeding problems that humans do. They routinely inbreed. I have fry (sisters and brothers) that have grown and breed. They only care about who is male and who is female. Some fry just have better color than others. Single those out in a separate tank and encourage them to breed. That's how I -try- to improve the color in my fry. It's not a certain tactic, but works sometimes.

 

[gmaschke]

Its been suggested several times by reputeable sources that when line breeding sibling to sibling is still bad but father daughter or mother son is a better way of doing it. I do practice this with my fish. It has been my experrience that I get to many deformaties when breeding siblings.

And for the record when buying from any source a group of juvies is almost always siblings unless otherwise stated and even then there is no guarantee. I like to start with males and females from two different sources then cull and line breed.