I still think there is something unnatural going on with red severums. Have you ever seen anyone producing F1 red severums in the several years since they've been available? I've read a few accounts of male reds pairing with female golds, and I read one account here of two reds spawning and throwing all gold fry. Add to that the fact that almost every red severum being sold now is slightly short-bodied, and I'd say we are dealing with heavy inbreeding. Not to mention that the original super reds I got were actually more of a bright orange color, but the ones I've seen in the years since are almost neon red, to the point that they look like hormone-juiced discus. I still think there's more at play there than just genetics.
However, electric blue acaras and electric blue rams breed true, and to my knowledge these fish do not spawn outside of their genus. I have never seen anyone cross a ram to another species of fish. This leads me to believe that the chances of hybridization to get the electric blue gene are slim. I can't rule it out because I have no proof, but I'll be in the "highly unlikely" camp until someone proves otherwise. Late last year I did unintentionally get some hybrid Geos, so anything is possible.
I do find it odd that the electric blue coloration is so prevalent in South American based cichlids. Blue diamond discus have been around for a couple decades and they are essentially the same in coloration as other electric blue cichlids. Then you have EB acaras, EBJD, EB rams, Thai silk flowerhorns (same iridescent blue), etc. These are all fish that contain a lot of natural blue iridescence to begin with, so maybe it's a mutated gene that causes the color to express over the entire body rather than in striation/spotting as it usually would. This is essentially how pigeon blood discus came about -- the mutation causes the black pigment that forms the nine vertical stress bars on normal discus to disperse and spread throughout the body, giving you the "peppering" seen on pigeon bloods.
Also, if you want to do some fun reading on angelfish genetics, look into the Philippine Blue gene, or more recently, the Bulgarian Green gene. These came from average, aquarium-bred angel strains. In the case of the Bulgarian Green gene, the breeder noticed something odd in fry that had been line-bred for several generations in his own hatchery, raised the fry out and bred them, and found that he could get the gene to express in multiple strains of angels. So these naturally occuring mutations do happen, it just takes someone with a trained eye to notice a difference in very young fish and isolate them to work with them specifically. It's how most of the aquarium strains of discus came about, all the way back to Wattley Turquoise.
