# Oscar genetics?



## brittone05 (Sep 29, 2006)

Anyone any good at oscar genetics?

I have what I beleive to be a Lutino ( white, vibrant orange with albino eyes but black colouration to edges of fins as description on oscarfishlover) and she has bred with mky big red male.

I would like to keep a baby from them for the experience and for the long haul before anyone asks 

What can I expect from the young? Will they all just be normals?

Thanks in advance x


----------



## spinnin_tom (Apr 20, 2011)

are the colours ressesive or dominant?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics)


----------



## brittone05 (Sep 29, 2006)

lmao Tom - ask me a question I may know the answer to 

Genetics and me don't mix at all! 

i know that the first reds were introduced by a Thai fella who line bred for colour or something? Lutino is ( or was ) a fabulous colour to have in a oscar collection according to some sites?


----------



## FeralWild (May 9, 2011)

Fish genetics is quite a tricky one to explain because a lot of mutations don't or can't breed true. The best way to get a fish that you want from a spawning is to cross two unrelated colour types to produce a shoal of mixed colour type offspring which may or may not have one or two fish of the colour you want.

I breed Oranda goldfish now but have bred oscars before. With Goldfish, they are a classic example of fish that won't breed true. Two common goldfish would produce a shoal of olice green fry who may or may not turn an assortment of gold, white and black with age, but with the orandas, you not only get an assortment of colour types, you also get an assortment of tail types and head growth types, from none at all, to head and nasal growths. This is from two pure oranda parents.

However in the case of Oscars,a pair of natural Peacock oscar parents that were wild caught would only produce wild type offspring. However if a fish from that shoal were to be bred with a captive bred red oscar, the offspring would be of two possibilities. Either they would all still be peacock, or they might be 70% peacock fry and 25 Red, and a possible 5% albino because the red would not have pure red genetics. Any fish not wild caught or bred captively from a red would always have genetics that suggest a split for gene which is somewhere back along the gentic generation line. Albino Oscars have a defective pigment gene which makes them albino in the first place. A pure cream fish with red eyes is an albino, but then there are albino morphs which are cream with red eyes and pale pink or blood red markings. A lutino has bright tango orange markings and yellow or pink eyes, not red. In your case I think you have a Albino morph which is a combination of a albino and a lutino so not a pure lutino but still an interesting colour form all the same.

As to the offspring, mated to a red male, the resulting offspring will mostly be red but there will also be some olive and red fry and a fair few albino, lutino crosses as well. However due to the defective gene from the albino/lutino morph and the possible back genetics of the male, you may also get blue, grey and yellow thrown in somewhere but you would not know for sure until the fry are about an inch in size.

This is just a possibility for the future offspring as there are no guarantees in gentics but that is what I expect the likely outcome is.


----------



## Moogloo (Mar 15, 2010)

Hmmm indeed, you would need to know whether the genes were dominant, codominant or recessive and you would need to know at least 2-3 generations on both sides to know what hetrozygous genes might be passed on. The fish might both be het for the same gene (two negatives make a positive and all that) would mean you got babies in the colour both parents are het for.

But if oscars dont really breed true, i cant see how its going to be predictable. I would assume a lot of the colours are line bred for colour to a point where, when bred, they often produce the right colours by sheer luck and the colour isnt really a genetic or hereditary colour. I would assume this to be the case for all the colours except the wilds and the albinos. They are just the result of a lot of line breeding.

There seems to be a lot of debate about it all though, i found this page interesting:

http://www.oscarfish.com/article-home/oscars/58-what-are-albino-and-lutinos.html


----------



## FeralWild (May 9, 2011)

The problem is that there will always be debate on any form of genetic breeding as everyone gets different results from their own breeding programs. They then post them and people disagree with the results as they may have bred a fish colour similar to the report and got a different result.

The post I made was my personal opinion with regards to my previous breeding of oscars and the suggested results I assumed would be the case. But as I said, there are no guarantees.


----------



## Lucky Eddie (Oct 7, 2009)

I would have thought that all red eyed mutations (ie those involving loss of melanin) are recessive................otherwise the mutation would be a lot more common in the wild.

So, you should end up with 100% normal colour, unless one parent is split, in which case you would have 50% red eyed, 50 % het for red eyes.

Trouble is, some red eyed mutations (cinnamon in canaries for example) is sexed linked, carried on the X chromosome..................in which case, I wouldn't have a clue of the outcome.

Chances are, all the offspring will be visually normal.


----------



## brittone05 (Sep 29, 2006)

Thanks everyone  Feral - what clours did you breed primarily? Any tips for rearing fry myself as I have now removed the rock from the tank and have it in a QT tank with air stone etc in.

Eggs are looking great so far - nice colouration, no fungus visible and all nicely attached to the rock still. At a rough guestimate, there is about 80-120 eggs after the parents scoffed any that were dud looking.

I aim to have a nice 7 footer set up in the garage by the time they are large enough to be moved ( it is in the process of being done as we speak ) and have a couple of contacts who have suitably sized tanks that want one of the young  xx


----------



## Moogloo (Mar 15, 2010)

Its an interesting thought though!

The lack of knowledge behind the gentics of oscars really...

To me... cats...dogs... hamsters...rats...mice...canaries... the most common of each species are all fairly well understood and yet oscars, besides goldfish, are one of the most common species are so far from understanding!

Though to be fair its a species that doesnt need lots of babies to be produced so unless someone wants to breed to gain knowledge and then cull most of the babies, its not an easy task to take on. But to gain real knowledge, it will be an epic task and i think with so many seperate opinions from people with one clutch of babies is the hardway of learning the genetics!

Its just got to the point where there are far more exciting secies out there that the people capable of breeding on such a large scale moved n from oscars as soon as they left their teens 

Its a shame but not an easy way around it.


----------



## FeralWild (May 9, 2011)

When I bred mine, it was accidental the first time as I didn't realise the parents were old enough and they only produced about 50 eggs and all of the fry died shortly after the free swimming stage because the mother ate them all.

However when they were a little older I deliberately conditioned the adults again and induced them to breed by doing a 30% water change with water which was 2 C lower than the 28c of the tank. Its something I read somewhere about how most Neotropical cichlids breed during the rainy season and are stimulated by fresh rain water filling the ponds and rivers and washing a lot of live foods into the rivers. I stimulated the foods by mixing a small handful of whitebait in with each bucket of water. About six tiny fish each time. The oscars gathered them up whilst moving round the tank and over night began a courtship display with the male sidling up beside the female and them swimming parallel to each other in a circular motion.

After the courtship, they began to pick clean a large slate I had put in the tank and the female positioned herself over the slate two days later and started to lay the eggs. There were about 400 eggs at the start and 1 in 50 was infertile which the male picked off and ate. The eggs two 48 hours to hatch and once free swimming, the parents shooed them to a depression in the gravel where they stayed for the first week, only venturing out for foods. After the first week they started to shoal around the female and followed her round whilst the male swam back and forth picking up stragglers and keeping an eye out for any would be predators, though there were no other fish in the tank. Once they were a week old I fed them on newly hatched brine shrimp and eventually weaned them onto live daphnia, ZM cichlid fry granules and eventually brine shrimp and blood worm. Once the fry spent more time away from the parents at about a half inch long, I netted them all out to a new tank and started to cull off any deformed or pale or undersized fry. I eventually got the brood down to 80 and once they were 1 inch long, they went in four groups, to four seperate fish shops.

The parents were an albino female. White with red eyes and slight red markings along the base of the dorsal and caudal fins. The male was a wild type peacock, olive brown with the eye spot on the tail and a metallic red blotch behind the gill plates and slight red on the front of the pectoral fins. He had black eyes.

The babies were 75% peacock like the father, and the other 25% were albinos but with a mix of red and pink eyes and almost all had snakeskin red markings along the flanks.

A couple of years later I bred a blue to a metallic red and got mostly all metallic red offspring with a small amount of blue and purple offspring, some even purple with white patches. 


If you are rearing your eggs artificially, then you need a tank filled with water syphoned from the parents tank and heated to 28 c. It needs to be filtered by a sponge filter. Not a box filter with a sponge in it, but an air powered sponge filter.

Do not use gravel or sand on the bottom but obviously have the rock with the eggs on it, which you can then remove once the eggs hatch. Have a bunch or two of plants for shelter though plastic ones are safer for fry than live.

The eggs will hatch and the fry will cling to the site for 48 hours until they have absorbed their yolk sacs and then they will instinctively cluster together into a tight shoal and move into a corner or into the weed. Even when artificially raised, the fry will instinctively try to find their mother and as a shoal will move about the tank, almost as though looking for mum and dad. Eventually they will admit defeat and keep swimming back to the safety of the weeds everytime you approach the tank.

Feed them five times a day on enough newly hatched brine shrimp that they can consume within a minute. Any that survives will die (ironically) after ten mins or so and sink to the bottom. You need to syphon this off into a shallow dish using airline tubing. The dish is incase you suck up any fry.
Once they are actively feeding on brineshrimp, you can wean them onto daphnia but it has to be alive. Also ZM still make fine grade fry foods but you will have to find it online and order some. But you will only need a tub of it. Don't go mad and buy a kilo or anything. The ZM or brineshrimp is the best foods but you need to start them off on brineshrimp because they won't feed without a wriggle factor.

Once they are big enough to develop noticable features such as colour and shape, you need to weed out the weaker and mishaped ones and cull them. Its up to you how you do it, and different people will suggest different ways but my personal way is to hold the fish facing down, by the tail and give a sharp flick to the head. This knocks them dead immediately without pain or stress. Do not run them under a hot tap in a net as I saw suggested on here recently or put them in a freezer. I then feed the dead fry back to their parents as by that point the maternal instincts have gone and the adults just see them as food.

Once you have a reasonably healthy coloured brood, you can either find homes for them or keep some.


----------



## brittone05 (Sep 29, 2006)

Thanks Feral  Really useful info there 

I have the rock at present in a good sized QT tank - not so large that they will be lost or struggle to find fod and not too small that temp control etc will be an issue.

I have a sponge filter there with an air line in also.

So far, only 1 of the eggs remaining looks to begoing white, the rest are alla nice colour still.

She laid them Monday night so I would expect them to hatch some time before tomorrow night ( 3 days seems to be the norm? )

I have a brine shrimp hatchery running and also have contact with a lady who can supply me with freshly hatched brine shrimp in case mine don't work out ( never done them before ) and have got some fry suitable food to pick up tomorow from our local LFS who breeds his own cichlids etc

I really hope the eggs wrk out, don't hold out much hope for my first time doing them but now I know I have a "pair" in the red and lutino then I am happy enough to give it a shot.

Thanks again xx


----------

