Juggernaut and New Female (Midas)

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Right, you can simply look at a fish & tell exactly what its provenance back to the wild is. If you possess such amazing powers you should be spending your money buying lottery tickets, not fish. ;)
 
Right, you can simply look at a fish & tell exactly what its provenance back to the wild is. If you possess such amazing powers you should be spending your money buying lottery tickets, not fish. ;)

ok what ever u assume i don't know where my fish come from but i do but you think conkel rapps and sharifi do look like you go by pictures posting jeff's picture bizarre............ and you really go around looking for ppl who post midas threads so you can throw your links at people who comment on other people's post "opinions" get a life dude :)
 
According to Sharifi, Rapps-Conkel-George Fear, are ordering from him. If this is remotely true then what TUIC is selling should look like COA's stock whether they are true Midas or not.
 
I wasn't posting here to defend any vendors honour, and clearly everyone is welcome to their own opinion - my point was that it's impossible to simply eye ball most fish that fall under the midas complex and determine with 100% certainty what its exact genetic make up is.

Without specific information on the collection location or that of the parents it becomes nothing more than an educated guess. And yes, one has to always consider how credible and honest the supplier is.

And on that note .....

Dan - you stated;

Female is a costa rican cit.

Can you be more specific, such as an actual body of water? There can be vast differences between a "midas" collected in the Rio San Juan, and those collected in a Nicaraguan crater lake such as Lake Managua. As a potential buyer, and someone looking to breed a clean, pure line of citrinellus, I would want to know exactly where your line of "midas" originated from.

Thanks.
 
How much for the pair Ken? I'll drive there from Cali to pick up.
 
Nevermind, I just checked your website & see they are listed as being from Lake Arenal.

This may explain a lot. Lake Arenal is basically a land locked reservoir that was enlarged when a hydro electric dam was built back in the late 1970's. According to William Bussing (a well respected researcher in this area) in his book that was first published in 1987 "Peces de las aguas continentales de Costa Rica",

he states;
...... the A. citrinellus found in Lake Arenal were probably introduced by man.


William Bussing's credentials can be found here:
http://biogeodb.stri.si.edu/sftep/contributors.php?id=10


Now if one factors in the vast differences found within these fish in the various crater lakes, such as detailed in the following paper, there could be a very good explanation as to why a fish collected from Lake Arenal doesn't look quite like a citrinellus collected in lake Managua, which is where I believe all of Rapps citrinellus were collected years ago.


Body shape variation in cichlid fishes of the Amphilophus citrinellus species complex

http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-32793/P147.pdf?sequence=1


If the amphilophus in Lake Arenal were in fact introduced by man, then I think that it's safe to assume that those original fish would have been collected & transported from the closest place possible, which in this case would have been Lake Nicaragua, which of course also contains A. labiatus.

Considering all of the above, IMHO the genetic make up of any amphilophus collected in Lake Arenal would in the very least be somewhat questionable. Which is why IMO the best approach when breeding any of the amphilophus found within the crater lakes it is always best to ensure that both parent fish come from the same body of water, and in some cases the exact same collection location within that body of water. Short of that you might as well consider the offspring of random pairings as Midevils, just like the ones that are found at your LFS. (sorry Ken)

So TruMidasKing, in a round about way I would at least now agree with you that there is a very good chance that these fish are most likely not going to be the same as the citrinellus that Jeff brought in several years ago, and they could even be of mixed origin.

I've read scores of papers/studies on the midas complex and I do not recall any of these studies involving Lake Arenal, or for that matter it even being mentioned. Considering William Bussing's comment, there's probably a good reason for that.
 
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