Few westerners have the patience or space to take a spawn, grow it out to adult size, and all the along the way weed (cull) out all the weak, generic, and bland looking individuals. And then only mate the best ones.
So what most spawns end up like, are a bunch of generic looking, dull fish, that are unidentifiable. This "fad" is producing fish, that no serious cichlid keeper would want to breed, because they are all mutts. And is ruining the ability to find true species in all but the most respected places. Without a paper trail of provenance, it may soon become impossible to find a true festae, and may become so expensive to buy a true cichlid of any species, it will become out of reach. And unless a LFS can provide me proof that a species is what they say it is, I'm already skeptical enough not to pay anything for it.
In the same manner that when you breed different races of dogs together, you end up with a brown or grey dog that looks like every other mutt in the world, this is how most hybrids end up. We may need an AKC of cichlids to find a good one.
The island where I live is full of mutts and is the perfect example of random crossing, all the dogs look look similar to the one below
There is also the problem in not only passing on, or losing certain genes that a fish in one area has developed to ward off disease because of evolution in a unique environment.
Although the disease "duck lips" was common in hybrid livebearers for decades, it has in the last decade become almost epidemic in cichlids, as the bacteria become stronger.
In order to breed lots of sellable FHs, random antibiotic treatments were needed, and have created super bacteria (Columnaris for one), that will be much harder to irradiate from our tanks.
I attribute this to the advent of the flower horn, and funny, the disease was once called flower horn disease.
