peppering

[troy]

Hi all

Just got some malbro red discus.
When breeding them do you need to avoid heavy peppered ones so the off spring have less peppering .

[RyanH]

I'm not an expert on genetics but it's my understanding that if parents produce clean offspring and peppered offspring then this is just a variation in phenotype... not genotype. The F2 generation will be just as likely to have peppering as the F0 and F1 generations even if their F1 parents happened to be cleaner than some of their siblings... in other words, they all carry the same genetic information regardless of the traits that they actually display. You just have some variation in how the offspring display those traits.

I've talked to some breeders who are crossing their PB-based fish with albino Discus to reduce peppering.

[Carol_Roberts]

I don't see how a cross to an albino would reduce pepper. . . . Albino is a lack of pigment. Either you have two gene for it or you don't. If you don't, then the underlying type of discus shows up - like snakeskin.

Maybe there is some other gene in there that I don't know about. :)

[RyanH]

I don't understand it either Carol. As I tried to explain in the earlier post, just because a fish is displaying a certain trait, doesn't mean that is the entire story of it's genetic heritage. But I have seen an "albino" strain of Discus. Maybe these do breed true 100% of the time. It seems to me that it would take several generations to be able to do that.