Could i create a new strain of livebearer?

Question

by crossing endlers with guppys

and then cross the end result with leopard fish

http://www.petmart.co.nz/cart_product6916-1-.html?Search=leopard&Start=1&Title=LEOPARD%20FISH%206CM

is this possable

if i do manage to what should i name the new type of fish

Answer 1

i have no idea you could try if you succed that will be great

Answer 2

you could try, but they're all so closely related they wouldn't look very different. as for fancy guppies cross bred with endlers, you'll preactically end up sith tuxedo guppies. when you breed them with leopard fish they will probably just lose some colour and develop dots on their tails. alternatively, what i have found through my breeding experiences, each fry will favour either the colour strain from the male or the colour strain from the female, not a mix.

you could always give it a go. good luck :)

Answer 3

Most endlers available in petstores are fancy guppy hybrids anyway.

Go on endlers r us, on my phone and can't link at the moment.

Getting a true strain of guppy/endler to breed true takes months/years of dedicated line breeding and crossing back to parents. If you really want to do this you'll have to have many tanks and be prepared to cull fish as you will end up with hundreds of fish you don't want, ones that haven't bred true, and homes that only want a few, petstores won't take them. First generation guppy/endler hybrids are common as muck and don't look very appealing.

Answer 4

Crossbreeding livebearers IS possible (I think it was guppies and plattys I heard of being cross bred, but I dont remember. I know one of them was a guppy.

Fry rarely resulted from these encounters, and the majority of the fry that did result died within a few days. The fry remaining were usually sickly and died shortly after that. The very few still alive looked like plain, dull guppies.

So yes, THEORETICALLY you can, but cross breeding species is almost impossible. The genes do not match up, and the majority of your fry will be sickly and die.

EDIT: I just read that swordtails and platys readily breed. But I believe swordtails are just a distant strain of plattys anyways (the females are almost identical), so this doesnt help too much, Im sure

I also read that guppies will breed with mollies (maybe this is what I heard of earlier), but as I said before, results are usually not that great.

I read of a mail swordtail mating with a molly, and that was rare. But the fry had not been born yet, so survival rate is not known

Answer 5

I believe that Endlers are genetically identical to wild type guppies, but just from different locales. As such, they will readily interbreed, and you won't know which one is which. If you put either of them in with fancy guppies, they will breed together too, but you will just have less fancy looking fancy guppies, and wild type that are no longer looking like wild type. i.e., a mish mash of mediocre guppies. Fancy guppies have been in-bred for many generations in order to fix certain patterns, and in the process have lost a lot of their vigour and vitality. I also find them rather stupid in comparison to other livebearers, even if they are exquisitely beautiful. I had some wild guppies that were collected from a ditch in Trinidad. They were alert, intelligent, and hardy, but certainly no match in colour in comparison to the fancy guppies. They had much more interesting personalities than the fancy guppies.

What you can do, though, is to develop a new colour strain of fancy guppy by choosing parents that have the characteristics that you want, then keeping the babies that are the closest to the type that you are trying to develop. Apparently six or more generations will bring you to where they are breeding true to your desired standard. It depends on whether your desired characteristics are carried by dominant or recessive genes. this can be observed over several generations of breeding the offspring. I suggest you find a book that explains dominant and recessive gene patterns as it applies to fish. Or perhaps it would be easier to Google for that information. There is a wealth of material on the topic of fish genetics as it applies to developing new colour strains of livebearing fish. If you come up with something that other people want you could find that there is a demand for that colour strain!

I have experimented a bit with combining different colours of platies - it was interesting to see what I would get with different combinations.

I do not know what you mean by leopard fish. if they are a different species altogether, it wouldn't work. Even though a molly might mate with a guppy, there are few enough other species that can be successfully hybridized. A number of different species of cichlids will successfully interbreed, but that is just because they were pretty closely related in the first place.

It can be fun to develop a new colour strain. Good luck.

When it comes to naming a new strain, the sky's the limit. You are only limited by how creative your imagination is. Once you have fixed the characteristics so that they breed true, others will gladly help you choose a name once they know what they look like. Go for it!