For years I've been drawn to the idea of a green platy, and a year or so ago I started a project to produce them. What I had in mind was something like a maculatus type with the colour of a good green swordtail or of a variatus. Usual provisos that all the available stock in the hobby has some hybridity. I'd tried in the distant past to cross green swords with blue maculatus and never succeeded. That was twenty-odd years ago and in the meantime the quality of green swords in the trade seems to have sunk even lower, washed out greens with muddy red staining.
When I started the slate cube (journal grossly in need of updating) I had a notion for green platys. In the event I succumbed to the lure of the cardinal tetra, so the idea of a subtle palette of fish colours took a knock, but the dream lived on.
About 18 months ago I set up a 35L tank with about half a dozen variatus females and three or four blue maculatus males. I wanted as little of the red-orange tone from the variatus as possible, but still haven't had much success finding females without quite a bit of those tones in the caudal area. The blue maculatus were a mix of mickey mouse and wagtail .. it's hard to find blue platys that aren't one or the other. Roughly speaking, I'm looking for the olive green body colour of the variatus, with the blue iridescence of the maculatus over it.
After initial drops that looked all straight variatus, as you'd expect, I started to see hybrids. For the most part these looked at first glance like the variatus, but with mickey mouse or wagtail markings, albeit less strongly marked than the parent maculatus. After a few months I removed the blue males. I left the variatus females in for a few months more, to let them produce more hybrid broods, and for the last six months or so (I'm rubbish at documentation) the tank has had only hybrids in it. The exception was when I found a maculatus male with particularly good blue colour, and I let him have the run of the tank for a couple of weeks.
I think the tank is now mostly F2, plus some hybrid x maculatus back crosses, and with perhaps a few of the F1 still there. For the last few months all I've really done is occasionally 'process' (Charles Clapsaddle's term) the tank, removing the most red-coloured fish. Hybrids go mostly to a stock tank with the original maculatus and variatus types. Very occasionally a fish in that tank looks something like my target phenotype and gets popped into the 35L. I'm loth to eliminate the hybrids that don't match my ideal, not least because in selecting against strong yellow-red tones, I found very quickly that I was selecting strongly against males.
The tank still throws occasional fish that are markedly orange. And all the main options still occur freqently; there are washed out blue platys with the slimmer variatus body type, and maculatus types with a lot of reddish tones. But increasingly I'm finding fish that look something like the target.
Anyway, I'd had notions of a much more organised project progress thread starting way back, and am just woefully disorganised, but I thought maybe I should at least put up a few photos. I clearly have work to do on the fish photography skills, but I'm proud to say that the java moss on the slate in the background is consistently pin sharp.
Ephie Wiedermann's paper on Platy Genetics has been invaluable, along with Charles Clapsaddle's blogs and youtube vids from Goliad farms. But I still have loads of questions, and there are directions I want to explore particularly in relation to finding better stock for making the initial crosses (some X. montezumae may feature at some point). But we'll see.
When I started the slate cube (journal grossly in need of updating) I had a notion for green platys. In the event I succumbed to the lure of the cardinal tetra, so the idea of a subtle palette of fish colours took a knock, but the dream lived on.
About 18 months ago I set up a 35L tank with about half a dozen variatus females and three or four blue maculatus males. I wanted as little of the red-orange tone from the variatus as possible, but still haven't had much success finding females without quite a bit of those tones in the caudal area. The blue maculatus were a mix of mickey mouse and wagtail .. it's hard to find blue platys that aren't one or the other. Roughly speaking, I'm looking for the olive green body colour of the variatus, with the blue iridescence of the maculatus over it.
After initial drops that looked all straight variatus, as you'd expect, I started to see hybrids. For the most part these looked at first glance like the variatus, but with mickey mouse or wagtail markings, albeit less strongly marked than the parent maculatus. After a few months I removed the blue males. I left the variatus females in for a few months more, to let them produce more hybrid broods, and for the last six months or so (I'm rubbish at documentation) the tank has had only hybrids in it. The exception was when I found a maculatus male with particularly good blue colour, and I let him have the run of the tank for a couple of weeks.
I think the tank is now mostly F2, plus some hybrid x maculatus back crosses, and with perhaps a few of the F1 still there. For the last few months all I've really done is occasionally 'process' (Charles Clapsaddle's term) the tank, removing the most red-coloured fish. Hybrids go mostly to a stock tank with the original maculatus and variatus types. Very occasionally a fish in that tank looks something like my target phenotype and gets popped into the 35L. I'm loth to eliminate the hybrids that don't match my ideal, not least because in selecting against strong yellow-red tones, I found very quickly that I was selecting strongly against males.
The tank still throws occasional fish that are markedly orange. And all the main options still occur freqently; there are washed out blue platys with the slimmer variatus body type, and maculatus types with a lot of reddish tones. But increasingly I'm finding fish that look something like the target.
Anyway, I'd had notions of a much more organised project progress thread starting way back, and am just woefully disorganised, but I thought maybe I should at least put up a few photos. I clearly have work to do on the fish photography skills, but I'm proud to say that the java moss on the slate in the background is consistently pin sharp.
Ephie Wiedermann's paper on Platy Genetics has been invaluable, along with Charles Clapsaddle's blogs and youtube vids from Goliad farms. But I still have loads of questions, and there are directions I want to explore particularly in relation to finding better stock for making the initial crosses (some X. montezumae may feature at some point). But we'll see.
Attachments
Last edited:
