Good afternoon!
I have a small pond with goldfish, leopard danios, a couple old zebra danios, and golden white cloud mountain minnows (it's not overstocked, don't worry, I'm very mindful of this and get excellent ponding advice in another forum when needed). I have some fry that are clearly not goldfish fry, but also don't really look like the images I've found of danio or golden WCMM fry either, so I'm not sure if it's just the color differences/enrichment from the pond environment or if one of my species has bred a color variant. The fry range from newborn to 3/4" in length and even at that size I still cannot tell which species they are. They are black with a single iridescent spot behind the head when they are very small, and this becomes an iridescent line along the dorsum as they get a bit bigger, but otherwise they still appear to be largely black. I haven't tried to net one since they are still quite small and very fast. Behavior wise, they act more like my danios, but it's only my WCMM that have a iridescent dorsal streak, so confused. Any ideas?
I have a small pond with goldfish, leopard danios, a couple old zebra danios, and golden white cloud mountain minnows (it's not overstocked, don't worry, I'm very mindful of this and get excellent ponding advice in another forum when needed). I have some fry that are clearly not goldfish fry, but also don't really look like the images I've found of danio or golden WCMM fry either, so I'm not sure if it's just the color differences/enrichment from the pond environment or if one of my species has bred a color variant. The fry range from newborn to 3/4" in length and even at that size I still cannot tell which species they are. They are black with a single iridescent spot behind the head when they are very small, and this becomes an iridescent line along the dorsum as they get a bit bigger, but otherwise they still appear to be largely black. I haven't tried to net one since they are still quite small and very fast. Behavior wise, they act more like my danios, but it's only my WCMM that have a iridescent dorsal streak, so confused. Any ideas?