Breeding FW Fish?

[dan2x38]

I am breeding CPD which are egg scatters. New to breeding any egg layers. Is inter-breeding an issue? Is it a good idea to breed your strain with some elses? Will breeding with another strain make the fry stronger? Any other advice would be helpful.

[Fishnut]

I'm not too sure if it makes such a difference in fish, but breeding sisters and brothers or young to their parents is limiting the influx of new genetic material and making the species either weaker or potentially riddled with defects.  You might be taking a hardy strain and creating one that will eventually be sensitive and prone to crashing.  I think for the first generation of inbreds, there would be no clear difference, but eventually it will show.

This is just my opinion and a practice I like to follow.  When I was breeding Angel Fish, I put a group of adults together to find another pair.  I made sure siblings were not in the mix.  Each pair I had produced massive spawns and the fry were perfect and hardy.  I think in the hundreds of fish that I hatched, there were less than 5 that had a defect.

If you think about it, wild caught fish are usually more colourful and robust.  If they survive the stress of capture, transport and a change of diet, they usually look much healthier than many fish of the same species that were mass bred in captivity.

Perhaps this needs research.

[dan2x38]

What you say sounds very valid. I notice wild caught fish are more vibrant. The CPD we have are wild breed. The guppy for instance & platies were very hardy fish. Now with all the line breeding and likely inter breeding those species are not as hardy. I posted hoping to hear from several local breeders.

You breed other fish for some time? What different species?

I have seen fry swimming in my main CPD spawning tank. I think they do hide in the moss and eat in there. In the tank I swap the moss to when I pull the fry out they head into the moss. Then I must wait for them to come out again. It takes more than 3 days for them to hatch out or swim out of the moss. After a week most of them are hatched and swimming free.

[mseguin]

Generally, you probably don't want to be going much more than 3 generations within a strain without outbreeding to a different strain.

[Fishnut]

To answer your question Dan, I used to have a fish room when I lived with my grandparents for a year.  I resurrected my father's old fish room in their basement.  He's the one who infected me with the passion for the hobby.  He doesn't keep fish anymore, but is a fountain of information.  He bred fish like mad...infact anything he put in his fish room eventually spawned.  I think he had a pair of convicts so that he could use the fry as live food for the rest of his collection.  My first memory of aquariums as a child was a 50 gallon tank in the livingroom, bursting with amazon swordplants and vals, with some stunning silver angelfish.

I have bred pearl gouramis, angel fish (that was the majority of the fish room), white clouds, fantail goldfish (although no fry survived), and I've done the livebearer thing. I was selectively breeding guppies and had a strain where the males were light grey on the head, darkening to black just behind the belly with a big beautiful maroon tail that looked like velvet.  It fizzled out because I couldn't find any new blood that resembled my strain.  I just kept the males and females seperate. 

I also worked at the pet shop so any fry that I found was brought home and raised, then sold back to the LFS.  I scooped up a brood of Salvini cichlids (beautiful cichlids) and raised them.  I actually put a tank on the patio during the summer months and left them out there.  I fed them once a week and there was a lot of algae in the tank, but they were incredibly healthy!  They were the most beautiful, vibrant fish by the time they came back inside and the LFS was in awe when I sold them back.  It's amazing what natural sunlight and mosquito larvae will do to fish!

[dan2x38]

Wow quite a CV. Your Grandfather is still with you? Then it would also make sense to breed wild caught with tank breed?

[mseguin]

You probably don't want to breed wild caught to captive bred, but it also depends on the fish. With some fish, nobody really cares if they're WC, at least not as much. For example, tetras, danios, etc. But with cichlids for example, WC can be fairly important. Once you get to 3 or more generations from wild caught though, you have a fish that's genetically quite different to its wild caught ancestor, and outbreeding would be a good idea.

[Fishnut]

Dan, my grandfather is sadly not with me anymore.  It is my father, however, who has the interest in fish and bred everything that he put in his fish room.

[dan2x38]

You probably don't want to breed wild caught to captive bred, but it also depends on the fish.

Should I keep my WC seperate from my tank breed?

Once you get to 3 or more generations from wild caught though, you have a fish that's genetically quite different to its wild caught ancestor, and outbreeding would be a good idea.

When you say outbreeding does that mean breeding the WC with tank breed?

[mseguin]

It's personal preference, if yuo care about locality and such than keep them separate, but if yuo don't then no reason not to mix them.
Outbreeding is breeding to specimens not of the same lineage, generally from a different genetic pool.

[dan2x38]

It's personal preference, if yuo care about locality and such than keep them separate, but if yuo don't then no reason not to mix them.
Outbreeding is breeding to specimens not of the same lineage, generally from a different genetic pool.

Sorry to be so slow... I go that part thanks. But do I understand that it is better not to breed WC with tank breed? So outbreeding would be with other's tank breed?

[mseguin]

It can be with other wild caughts from a different location, your own tank bred, or someone else's.
Again it all depends on preference. Many African cichlid breeders don't want to breed a WC fish from a particular locale because the fish can be quite different depending on locale, and outbreeding to captive bred fish will eliminate that uniqueness.

[Fishnut]

I doubt that would be the same with something like a CPD though.  Where cichlids have so many possibilities for uniqueness, All danios seem to look alike and are from the same area anyways.  Well, I plan on mixing some of my fry with the new pair I bought.