Texas cichlid and Carpintis are two different species... Herichthys cyanoguttatus and Herichthys carpintis respectively. Chairel, Vontehillo and Escondido are all Herichthys Carpintis collected at different places. This is nothing like Jack Dempseys.
EBJD are not hybrids, that makes no sense. They're natural variants and the simplest way to prove this is that you can breed two regular looking Jack Dempseys and produce EBJD fry. Obviously this will only happen if both parents had a recessive blue gene. There is no way that you would be able to do this by mixing different species... it's like breeding two convicts and getting flowerhorn fry, you can't. But if you breed two regular convicts and get a white convict then you must assume that the parents had the gene to begin with, or that it's a natural mutation, but this would be a convict nonetheless.
- If EBJD were hybrids the parents would show some kind of traits from the species used to make it, because there would be all kind of genes involved, both dominant and recessive. Breed a Midas to a Jag and you won't get 5 Jags and 5 Midas, you will get 10 fish that are a random mix of the two.
- The deformities associated with EBJD are a result of inbreeding, because it's faster, easier and cheaper. This can happen to any other cichlid. In fact most cichlids you find at big chain stores like petsmart have some kind of deformity already... some of them you can't even notice but if you compare these fish to wild caught specimens you will spot differences, because they too have been inbred to death. If you keep breeding your pair of convicts and then breed the fry to each other, etc, without adding new blood lines, you will most certainly get deformed convicts at some point.
