Tetra ID

I've been meaning to post this for some time, but haven't had a chance.

I found this fish at a local dealer, swimming in a large tank of widow tetra glofish. The dealer insisted that it is "just a red glofish," but that is clearly not the case - 'red' glofish I have seen are generally a pinkish-orange color, not the deep red of this specimen. This one also has the vertical stripes which are common in widow tetras, which are absent in glofish.

It was the only fish of the kind that he had, and I have never seen one like it before or since. It does seem to be some sort of widow tetra, as evident from the shape and pattern. Could it be bred this color? Or is it more likely to be dyed?

Looks like a dyed black skirt tetra to me, but I know next to nothing about "glofish" as I would never own one.

EliK said:

I've been meaning to post this for some time, but haven't had a chance.

I found this fish at a local dealer, swimming in a large tank of widow tetra glofish. The dealer insisted that it is "just a red glofish," but that is clearly not the case - 'red' glofish I have seen are generally a pinkish-orange color, not the deep red of this specimen. This one also has the vertical stripes which are common in widow tetras, which are absent in glofish.

It was the only fish of the kind that he had, and I have never seen one like it before or since. It does seem to be some sort of widow tetra, as evident from the shape and pattern. Could it be bred this color? Or is it more likely to be dyed?

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I have seen GloFish this color of red before, so I'm going to guess that it is, in fact, a glofish

I agree it looks like a glofish, I have seen a lot of different colored skirted tetras glofish at petco. They seem to be releasing new colors ever so often like the lime green bettas.

Glofish tetras are a gmo vversion of skirt tetras.

Originally skirt tetras are black with the stripes, but they have a leucistic variety called the white skirt tetra.

It is usually the white skirt tetras they use with the gmo glofish thing. Because the plain white coloring makes a brighter even colour of the glofish gene.

Rarely, white skirt tetras retain some level of black marks from the original colour form, usually just a small freckle or such. This could be a drastic version of this example...

Or most likely, this one did not hatch genetically white skirt and instead got gmo'd as a black skirt.


It will school with black skirt tetras, white skirt tetras, or any of the glofish skirt tetras. Any combination of those as well.