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I am cutting him some slack Koicop-san because in some ways I have been down a similar road just for experimentation sakes.
That's why I asked what parents were used to produce that fish. This info could help us better understand why the fish has such pale color and such mottled skin. In the past I have crossed a Yamabuki male X a female Hi Showa in the attempt to "reinvent" yellow color in new places. The results were highly variable and could be described as fodder for frequent trips to the optometrist's office since I spent gazillions of hours squinting and peering over the fry in attempts to select someting of value.
Amazingly about 40% of the fry from that pairing were some sort of Yamabuki or Orenji ogon with high degrees of variation in fin color. I ended up deselcting about 80% of those for random errent sumi placement in the form of Shimmies that held not apparent promise of future sumi pattern placement. Didn't want to promote more of the freckledgoi we see out of so many breeding efforts.
I produced very few Ki Utsuri or Ki Showa type fish but in all cases the color was significantly more intense than the color shown by Bradley's fish. At about 6 to 9 mos of age the emerging color quality was very apparent and could tell me if the fish was worth keeping to move on to the next stage. It was a one shot outcrossing attempt but all the color results where better so that tells me to be honest with Bradley and say that he should be expecting significantly better color results if the correct parents had been chosen.
All outcrossing type pairings are lots of work and required massive extra effort to preserve diverse offspring and then select at a later stage of development when you can more visually determine if there may be value in the 10% or 5% of fish that your retain for the next stage of develpment.
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