Caffeine thoughts this morning… my example of the natural form fish looking better that the line bred fish…

I really like my Denison barbs… I have 4 natural colored ones in a tank, along with ( I took a chance) on a gold one… apparently the gold ones colors can change, they can start to revert to standard color, usually stopping somewhere in between, and can be blind… I got lucky, as mine can see, and in the gold color… but for all the risks, mine is pretty, but, IMO, not as pretty as the natural colored ones…

I don’t fully understand all required to change the fish, so to me, some differences seem more than line breeding, but maybe magic can happen with line breeding… my electric blue acaras, and electric blue rams are stunning… are they better than where they came from??? That’s IMO, more in the eye of the beholder…

Welcome comments on these or other fish, that fit in the thread… not the best picture, but a regular, and gold Denison

You should try get a video on. Would probably do them more justice, if you can. Have always fancied these fish

I almost always prefer the natural-type fish to the weird ones. I'm sitting here looking at my hillstream loaches, padamya barbs, choprae danios, and Himalayan sand loaches, and I can't imagine trying to improve on them.

For me, this is especially true of form. My angelfish have been bred to have a blueish sheen, and that's pretty nice, but they still look like angelfish. The difference is subtle and strikes me more as a natural variation: When I'm fishing, I notice that some trout are more brightly colored than others. I like fish that look like they might occur in nature. I have no interest in koi angelfish or anything like that.

I've kept a few types of wild Bettas, and for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would selectively breed them for different colors. They are amazing just the way they are.

I'm a wild type snob, I guess. Because I enjoy fish behaviour, I prefer wild types. Their finnage and colouration are adaptations to a complex world.
A lot of people like linebreeding, and it demands incredible skill. It produces fish I simply don't find interesting though. A drab fish that does fascinating things beats a technicolour dullard every time. I have kept and enjoyed some bone ugly fish, and have kept and loved beautiful killifish that are just as they came from the wild world. I'm happy to have the best of both worlds.

But that's just me.

I also have a nature boy streak in me, and I love to marvel at the diversity of life on our planet. I watch bugs go by, and was really pleased the other day when the first Monarch butterflies visited my first year milkweed plants. I like to see how fish have evolved, and what those adaptations could mean. A big tail on a guppy is skilled genetic manipulation. A quick little wild guppy is a product of long evolution, and I prefer to see that. I can imagine it in a habitat, and think about that (if this makes sense). There are no such lessons in a banner-tailed mutant twice the size of the wild fish.

I like to look at a fancy Betta splendens. I like to watch a wild-type Betta splendens. One can struggle to swim, and drags around fantastic fins. The other is a rocket, a super effective mosquito hunter that moves sharply and abruptly, always on the alert. The wild type has minimal colour and short fins. But it has such vitality, and such behaviour.

This used to be called the "ornamental fish hobby", before people started calling it the tropical fish hobby. Now, we seem to call it the aquarium hobby. I'll go with that one, and leave the ornament fish to those who love them. I put ornaments on the Christmas tree.

I will never understand he urge to take a fish in nature which has a unique look and then ruin it. A perfect example is super whites. It is one thing to line breed a natural hybrid like the L236 v.s. taking something like a zebra pleco and doing the same. I have kept redline barbs now for well over 15 years. I would never allow anything but the true fish in any of my tanks.

Why would anybody want to change this How can one believe they can improve on this?

A while back albino rainbowfish started to appear and everyone wanted them except me. Anyone who has seen adult rainbowfish will know what colours can occur in nature. If you compare that to an albino rainbowfish that has pink eyes and a white body, why would you bother?

The worst part about this was the number of species of albino rainbowfish that appeared and they all looked exactly the same. It made me wonder why people would bother breeding them. I can understand having an albino fish because it's different, but I can't understand breeding for the albino trait so you have white rainbowfish. The colour is in their name, why remove the colour?

Albino black widow tetras (white skirt tetras) are another fish but skirt tetras don't have bright colours so black skirt and white skirt tetras can contrast against each other.

Albino glowlight tetras and flame tetras are boring and albino neon tetras look the same as albino glowlights. Why would you drop the red and blue line from a neon tetra to have a small white fish?

Albino peacock cichlids (Aulonocara sp) from Lake Malawi. Why would you do that? A male Aulonocara is beautiful, why get rid of the colour and turn the fish white?

I really like the “Congo Tetra( interuptus) but I’ve seen albinos of those, and thought that was a huge mistake as well… I’m sure these were photographed under blue lights, as I’ve seen them before in real light, and they lose all their iridescent colors


And how about albino neons… totally seems counter productive

And don’t get me started on the albino rummy noses… I do have the line bred platinum variety, but they have more color, not less

I do have some albino Cory’s, that I like in my Black sand tank, but generally I can’t see taking something colorful, and making it white

The most common fish I have that have been line bred, are the bushy noses I do have several of the super reds, several albino’s, and some long fins, but they didn’t start out beautiful in the 1st place

It's interesting, in its way. People like new things - novelties. There are two ways farms can do this - a colour morph or albino that they already know how to mass produce, and have breeders trained in, or a newly found tetra (for example) that would take some investment in learning and some time to create a market. Guess what's easier?

Plus if I list Hyphessobrycon negadagua, and I list neon tetras, even if they could be the same price, 99.999% of hobbyists will only buy the fish they know. There's a pendulum I see. When hobbyists get into nature and breeding, rarities have a market. When, like now, it's all consumption and linebreds, they stay with the tried and true. We're going through a not very curious phase now. A lot of that is the power of the chain box stores limiting our vision. Their purchasing is so predictable based on market studies and the lowest prices. There is little market for "new" unless it's dirt cheap.

A lot of these mutations show up. On several occasions, I've had killie 'sports' show up. I don't breed them. I once had an albino Xiphophorus couchianus, an extinct in the wild livebearer. I gave it to a linebreeder friend and it died without breeding at his place. That was probably a good thing.

Increasingly, markets like the US are fading in importance, and the hobby is thriving in China. There's seems to be a cultural preference for linebred mutations of fish, so since the big market drives the business, we get a lot of commercial sports.

I guess I don’t fall into that category.. I have 6 of those new “raccoon tetras” coming on Tuesday, next week…

it’s been a while since I was a regular, at the local fish store ( because we don’t have a dedicated fish store local, any more) but my visits to the semi local pet shop, where I buy feeders, and frozen food, I would say less than 20 %of their business is mature fish people. I would venture to guess, that 80% of their fish business is moms buying fish for the kids tanks ( it may really be the parents tanks ) but the kids are choosing the fish…

Which brings up, yes, we need future fish people, so are these glofish, bad for the hobby??? Maybe not for the hobby, but bad for the fish, when they aren’t pretty enough in natural form, to be chosen by future fish people…

The hobby is in rapid decline, on this continent. Look at how many stores are closing, and how many fish clubs have died off.

To me, we are a bit like stamp collecting was 50 years ago. There may be surviving fish breeding or specialty groups in a couple of decades, but I can see the big chains stopping fish sales in the near future, the way Walmart did here. My local box store has one side of one short aisle dedicated to fish stuff, and one small quarter wall of fishtanks. It has, overall, 10 aisles for dog and cat gear. The fish set up has less space than a small local Mom and Pop store would have had in the 70s.

Importers of rare fish are cutting back on regions, or not ordering new things because already, there are very few people buying oddities. I thought side hobbies like killies, where you have to breed the fish to have them would survive, but the average killie keeper in the US makes me look young. The last convention I went to had an average age well in the 70s, and they can no longer do stand alone conventions - they pair with Cichlid or livebearer groups.

We know how much fun this can be, but the water we swim in is drying up. Glofish aren't going to change that.

There is a major reasonthat the rarer most unusual fish are bought less often, the usually cost a lot more. This only changes if such fish are getting bred by hobbyists. When I got my first zebra plecos the offsptring at 1.5 inches sold for $150. Now one can buy a 100 of them ffrom Asian fush frams for about $30 or less. Of course the shipping and clearing cosr mat raise that by 5-10 dollars depending on the size of the order one does.

On the other hand true L173 plecos still sell for a small fortune. But this is due to the Brazilian l was prohitbitng their export.

Most of us on this site will do our homework before we acquire a new species. We want to be sure we can care for it properly. On the other hand many new fosh keepers just buy first and then ask why the fish are doing poorly or dying. I blame the internet and uneducated store employees for most of this. if you want bad information of any species, just Google it or find a vid on Youtube. More of it is wrong than correct. It is not easy to learn where the accurate information is.

Our local Walmart took out their tanks around Covid, and the never came back… no local place to buy fish of any kind, except for the deli at the grocery store

Your Walmart sold aquarium fish? Or am I missing something

A lot of them had a few tanks… ours used to have 10 or 12 tanks… I think they did a remodel just before Covid, and dropped the tanks