What causes peppering?

[The_Finglonger]

Does anyone know what causes peppering in discus?
Is it a species thing where some are more susceptible to others?
Is it about water quality, environment, diet, tank mates, stress?

[LizStreithorst]

You see pepper only in Pigeon Bloods. Pigeons are a mutation of Turks inwhich the regular stress bars were broken up into tiny little dots that we call pepper. The early Pigeons were very heavily peppered.

Stress bars are often use as camafloge in fish, and the same is true of pepper. A light, or even white background can help.

[Love Discus]

To expand on what Liz said, pepper is seen in pigieon bloods, pigion bloods have no stress bars, and some say the pepper in PBs is like a scrableing of the verticle bars. Alot of pigions today have almost no peppering. However the pigion blood gene is very dominent. For example a snow white crossed with any discus with verticle bars would result in heavily peppered PB offspring . I personally think pigions should only be crossed with other pigions.

I have a question of my own though, How dominent is the PB gene? I mean how many back crosses would it take for verticle bar offspring?
Or is that not established yet because nobody wants to raise that many ugly fish?

[joshuajames]

i have a few pigeon crosses.they have peppered stress bars. a little peppering threw out the rest of the body.kinda weird seeing peppered stress bars.i think they were cross between a checkerboard and a turq.not sure. all 3 look a lot different but all came from same batch.one kinda looks like a funky yellow and white turq.you can really tell the pigeon gene is dominant.my mutts.still very cool and different looking.