While I am personally not a big fan of butties, I always like to observe a tank full of little striped youngsters. There is something in their perfect stripy coats that entices me. Today, I stopped by the LFS and saw a tank of 1" butti fry. One thing that caught my eye is that out of the batch of 20 or so small fish, 2 had a very strange pattern to them: The 2nd black stripe from the tail was redused to a blotch, and the 3rd stripe completely missing 
In all my years of fish keeping have I ever come across a tilapia butticoferi with pattern variations. Unless I am crazy and this is a normal juvenile coloration, I would assume that this is a genetic mutation of some sort. If so, I am curious as to how rare it could be. How many of you have seen butties with missing/inperfect stripes?
In all my years of fish keeping have I ever come across a tilapia butticoferi with pattern variations. Unless I am crazy and this is a normal juvenile coloration, I would assume that this is a genetic mutation of some sort. If so, I am curious as to how rare it could be. How many of you have seen butties with missing/inperfect stripes?
