If I'm way off track with this please put me back on track.. But wouldn't it make sense if a person were to buy a group of ten or so true Altums of breeding quality and hope they pair off, raise several batches of their fry, cull the bad, sell the good juveniles, and hold back 50 or so juveniles that would be breeding "prospects". After that, when they come to a breeding age (and you've sorted the better from the best), mix them in with angels of another " colored" phenotype to produce colored, quality angels. Wouldn't this bring back a quality line of angels that we are not seeing in stores anymore? I may be way off track with this but its making sense in my head right now.. Maybe I'm just crazy lol
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Okay, question for the wise. I am considering breeding angels while slowly gathering what I do need, may need, and probably won't need for it lol. But question.. Why dont ww see more breeders breeding true altums? With the complaints about fish being so small and not good quality, why not start over? Forgive me if this question has already been asked.. I only made it to page 120 so far in this thread haha
Okay, let's try to get your tracks on straight.
First off, today's domestic Angelfish are more gentically P. Scalare and not p. Altum but you do have the right idea. There is quite a debate as to what specie or species exactly today's Angels came from. With new areas being opened and new color forms of P. Scalare coming in from these places, it's anyone's guess.
True P. Altums have a long history of being very difficult to breed in an aquarium although I have recently seen some breeders finally selling tank raised P. Altums so the "spell" may finally be broken on this line. I use the word TRUE because I have seen numerous pictures of P. scalare that have the title P.altum being used erroneously.
Back to your track, actually, the domesticated Angelfish dates back to as early as the early 1900s. Over the years new colors have been developed by selectively breeding certain traits until they became dominant traits. Some of the effects of this have been the disfigured fish we were talking about. Traditionally, when trying to procure a healthy line of fish that has been inbred, wild blood needed to be added back to the line somewhere around the 7th generation +/- . What that did was add back all the dominant characteristics that made the fish popular in the first place while hopefully keeping the "new" phenotype in tact. Once these fish were bred back to fish of the desired phenotype, the line continues with a stronger genetic pool. THAT was the theory and standard practice back when I first started breeding these fish. With today's fish, many are so many generations removed from wild stock that it would take more than just a single generation of "new blood" to fix the problems they show. Considering that there is little cause by the consumer to complain or demand that they get "properly" proportioned fish, there is little monetary incentive for breeders to go through the process of fixing the fish. Body disfigurement has become a mainstay of the tropical fish industry. Balloon fish, Angel rams?, parrotfish, all have gained a spot in our hearts that the disfigured Angelfish is hardly noticed. What is noticed however, is the fragility of these current fish as they do not hold up as well as the old stock and are being sold too soon ( IMO) when natural deaths are a normal occurrence.
Starting over: As I said before, today's fish are close to 100 years in the making. It would take a long time to recreate from scratch what we have today and nobody wants to take that on. The glimmer of hope however is that within every spawn of fish, (at least what I've seen in my old and recent spawns) there are a few, at least, "perfect" specimens and if the breeders only sold these fish or raised them as their only next generation of breeders, the corrections to the lines may take a lot less time. HOWEVER, you then have the economic considerations to consider. What incentive does a breeder have to throw away the majority of a spawn? Currently, NONE to my knowledge. That's because the customer is still willing to buy the fish "as-is". Should that stop, and the word got back to the breeder that bad quality fish would no longer be accepted, they would have no choice but to either clean up the lines or get out of the Angel breeding biz. That's my take as a breeder.
That's my desire as a hobbyist
Without getting overly complicated here, many of today's phenotypes are most likely from repetitive recessive genes being made into dominant genes which can pose a problem when trying to add back wild blood. As I stated before, I'm not sure how happy I am that I can breed a pair of similar phenotype fish and get so many phenotypes from them. This has the same potential implications that adding wild blood to these lines could potentially wipe out the whole line. It's a real dilemma.
So I hope I answered your question and you've enjoyed reading our little novella on breeding Angelfish
