Genetics

[satty]

Hello friends,
This is an interesting website which tells you all about Genes and how they determine the Physical character like skin colour,eye colur,fur colour and in the case of our Discus the various strains as being produced because f the various cmbinations of genes.
http://www.borg.com/~lubehawk/mendel.htm
This work on Genes and how they bring about the Physical character was done by Gregor Mendel a monk who did the Pioneering work and even now people are dumbstuck by his Visionary abt Genes and their transmission among generations,things will be a bit difficult to understand initially for people not into Science,but if you read it quite a number of times it becomes easy and nce you understand Voila it becomes fun constructing your own P-square and if you know the parent strain even more fun working ut the generatins.
I have constructed a P-square based on the posting in the Sticky on Colour inheritance

"I have noticed with my little fry that some have light bodies and some are darker with sort of little bars.The female being a Blue Turq and the male a Gold Pigeon".
This was Carols reply"The light ones are pigeons and the dark ones with bars are turks. Your daddy pigeon must be a cross"
With this this is how the P-square works out

[satty]

And for those of you who want to read more abt genes and their stuff this is the website
http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/1/concept/index.html
With this in mind we can reason out how we have got the Various strains of Discus-Starting from the heckels the wild Green blue and the brown as was found in nature and cross breeding between these pure bred forms leading to a New strain and they in turn being cross bred and so on.
Heres anther article on Inbreeding,Line breeding and Cross breeding and it gives a beautiful tabular cloumn on the Pros and Cons of these breeding types
http://www.messybeast.com/inbreed.htm
Thank you guys for spending your time on reading this.

[crimson cross]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Jason]

Hi Satty,

great info thanks for finding and sharing.

I'd like to add a few points about inbreeding and how it relates to discus as the topic is rarely talked or written about.
The average hobbyist will most likely never have inbred fish from breeding, most are purchased in that condition. Hobbyist breeding discus usually have random types pairing in a comunity tank or if they do breed brother to sister most do not line-breed for many generations, I've been breeding discus since 1988 and have only gone as far as F5 generation. Very, very, few breeders and hobbyist are working on multiple generation projects that have been many years in the making.
Although signs of too much inbreeding can happen as early as F1 as alot of strains are from the same gene pool or simply 2 fish paired-up that are unrelated can throw fish with the bad traits of both the parents.

IME these are the most common symptoms of inbreeding and I outcross when I see fry and adults with 2 or more of the symptoms, also as always some of these signs can be brought on with poor care.

-small adult size
-slow growth
-taking anywhere from 18 months to 2 years too mature.
-very low resistance to disease
-very small spawns

there are more but I find these to be the most common.

[satty]

Wow Jason its almost 20 years since you started breeding
discus, man you must be rich with experience so with your expertise can you build a Discus strain tree starting with the Heckels and wilds and how the various strains of discus were obtained crossing two strains to get a new strain -maybe a Discus pedigree!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Jason]

Well I don't really understand discus genetics beyond what any other layperson would. I don't think there has been much study into it and as far as understanding the species itself we are just scratching the suface.
Of course anything I write is pure speculation and in no way based on any scientific fact whatsoever.
My theory on wilds is that heckels and aequifasciata are a different species and are a result a comon ancestor wich was most likely split geographicly at some point and are the result of convergent evolution. I don't feel there is enough differences between heraldi(blue) and axelrodi(brown) to be split into sub-species, I would consider the Green(aequifasciata,aequifasciata) a distinct sub-species that is more closely related to browns and blues than the heckel and again this was probably the result of a population split somewhere in the amazons history.

As far as pure strains of discus there are very few that breed close to 100% true, it takes many, many generations to produce a true breeding strain 15-20 I am told. There aren't many in this category. Wattley turquoise, schmidte-focke red turquise, domestic brown, thai red royal, and royal blue are some examples of what I would consider true strains developed by man by his selection.

And lastly we have mutations, wich are genes and traits discovered while working with the fish. What I would consider mutations and how they occured are, I could be wrong though.

-Pigeon Blood-from red royal blue
-blue diamond-from cobalts
-goldens-from browns
-albinos-from alenquers or browns?
-ghosts-from brilliants
-snow whites-from browns or ghosts?

[satty]

Other experts to add more to this?