An oddball front?
- Thread starter Ash
- Start date
Your fish is pretty sure to be a hybrid. I've seen a few. There are even a few books that talk about the hybridization of fronts. Even if it were a "natural" abnormality it should be treated as a hybrid, and if you are ethical then you won't breed it and sell them. This is one reason why many fronts/gibberosa go for such a high dollar amount especially wild caughts. A decade ago, way too many unethical "Dr. Hybridsteins" bred any type of frontosa they could with no regard. It drove the prices down for domestics, but most experienced hobbyists quit buying them due to the lower quality specimens that were found everywhere. There was just a big discussion in the ACA whether about allowing hybrids...thankfully logic and education prevailed over the "cool" hybrid fans. A sad, but true, story is the first hybrid frontosa I ever saw was in a tank that had another obvious hybrid. The other hybrid was some sort of Pseudotropheus/Melanochromis mix. The thing had horizontal and vertical stripes which gave it a plaid or tic-tac-toe look.
rkc772 wrote:
rkc772 wrote:
My question would be to you "What happens when your grandchildren want to raise 6 OR 7 stripes, but everyone has created the 67 mutts and you can longer get any wild?" IMO, it is the duty of every advanced, educated, experienced hobbyist to try to open the eyes of the younger and/or newer members of the hobby to just how big a problem hybridization is and why it is so bad. One of the major reasons why conservation of many of the now extinct Victorian species has not worked has been due to hybrids. For those who have no clue about Lake Victoria it was an extinction of more species than the end of the dinosaurs and was caused by man's stupidity.
o__o okay well its not my fronts fault that is what it is and I love it all the same. My fronts are so small they are no where near breeding and wont be for quite awhile, so I am not going to worry about that for awhile, I'll worry about it when the time comes. As for the rest of my fronts they are all normal just some have 7 stripes on both sides and others have 6 stripes on both sides, nothing odd about them and they all have very pretty blues =) I am proud of them.
lol ok well they inbreed but then again what are the supposed to do if new fish are not provided for them to spawn with? they are kinda stuck, somehow I dont think there brain is big enough to know that inbreeding is gross..
I, and most others, have no problems with people keeping hybrids and being happy with them
. Personally, unless you were given them for free, I feel you were taken advantage of either directly or indirectly. It's the classic good vs. evil syndrome. Hopefully you, and others benefit from this discussion. In my view, someone before you knew they were selling hybrids and somewhere down the line of innocent buyers you ended up with them. No one is screaming for you to flush them or feed them to the cat since they make you happy. Now if you were to breed them and then sell/trade them you would become one of the evil doers since you no longer can use the "ignorance of hybridization" excuse 
Not everyone one who is a "Dr. Hybridstein" knowingly does the bad deeds on purpose. It's threads like this one that those like myself try to open the eyes of not only you, Ash, but every person who reads this. It's a bad situation that has really gotten worse. Conservation of species is extremely important since even now exporting wild fish is getting far worse than a decade ago. I saw a thread that got many people fired up here about a bad business called AquaArt Aquariums. If you all researched what has been going on in the hobby you'd be much more angry at the hybrid situation than the bad businessman. When one of us doesn't give a care about putting hybrids into circulation, the rest of us (and future generations) suffer. In this scenario, the six stripes couldn't be separated from the sevens if they were siblings since they all would be hybrids. It's a genetic thing having to do with dominant vs. recessive genes.Anyone who is thinking of buying some C. frontosa here is a little advice. Places like big chain stores and anywhere else that is selling fish just listed as frontosas are not good. They should have names like Mpimbwe, Burundis, Kigomas, Zaires, etc. This helps you to know you SHOULD be getting the same species. Places like Aquabid are a gamble since there are probably about as many good honest breeders/importers as there are outright crooks. If you just want something to put in your tank and will never get rid of, then its fine to buy an unknown or hybrid. I'd just make sure it was cheap.
it destorys biodiversity.
one day you won't be able to differentiate a dog from a cat.
or Ash from Jessica Simpson.
or chicken from fish.
