Re: What does a agassizii really look like.

[IDMiamiBob@aol.com]

Ed Pon writes:

<< When Uwe Romer spoke at the San Francisco Aquarium Society meeting one 
> to two years ago, he mentioned that all the color morphs of aggies are 
> in the genes of all aggies (my translation of what I though I heard).  
> In other words, if you get any pair of aggies and bred them through 
> enough generations, you should be able to isolate all the color morphs 
> by using various selection methods.   >>
>>

I think the operative word here will prove to be "should".  I tried for six
generations to get my orange-tails to get redder.  No luck.  These were not
guppies, with long records of inbreeding for selection, there were wild fish,
by golly.  But nothing.  I suspect that Dr. Romer was speaking of his personal
opinion, or a conjecture.  I know of no one who has made major progress in
getting blue aggies more or less blue.

It does seem reasonable, in light of what has been done with scalares through
selection of "sports", and also dwarf gouramis, that you might get some new
variations on the standard that you started with, but I suspect that if you
managed to selectively breed Rio Tefes long enough to get something similar
to, say, an Alenquer, then crossed the new line with a true Alenquer, you
would get something else entirely.  Again, this is only my opinion.

Perhaps, what Dr Romer was trying to say, and I would agree heartily with
this, is that , since all aggies originated from a single ancestral
population, it is probable that all the genes for all the color morphs were
present at that ancestral time, and that over the years(centuries? or
millenia???) different genes have become more prominent in different
populations.  And, corollary to that, there should remain residual occurances
of all those original genes in every population, but for whatever reason,
those scarce genes were not as successful in that particular population, of
procreating themselves.  But we should also allow for the occasional genetic
sport, such as the gold trout that was developed in West Virginia some years
ago, the veil -tailed angel, the split-tailed betta, the albino in just about
every species around.

Does this mean we could never be able to get an Alenquer-colored fish from a
Rio Tefe ancestry?  I don't think it is impossible to duplicate the color, but
there will be other variations of size, profile, finnage, whatever, however
small, that will distinguish this fish from a true Alenquer, which we may not
be even able to quantitavely measure, just as Homo sapiens from different
parts of its "natural range" have distinguished themselves from one another by
a number of physical characteristics.  And I suspect that, no matter how many
generations of Swedes selectively breed in the hopes of developing more
melatonin, they will likely never become as dark as a native of Kenya or
Ceylon.

This is a little long, but it is a complex issue, and I'm sure this thread
will go on for a while.  But I never got red-tails from my stock of orange-
tails, and if I still had them, I'd be glad to ship them to Uwe and let him
try, confident of the fact that it would never happen.

Bob Dixon