Stage 1: One Way Ticket

When you breed goldfish,
1+1 ≠ 2
~ Louis Chan, Tung Hoi Aquarium Company

The accelerated growth in all-summer tropical climate enables goldfish to attain sexual maturity much earlier than goldfish kept in the cooler climates. However, the law of nature is an equilibrium system -goldfish that mature faster also will have shorter lifespan. Although it is possible to breed 3 generations of goldfish within a year in the tropical climate, it is crucial to wait for them to mature further to review stronger genetic traits to select the best breeders for the next propagation.

In 2006, stage 1 of the project was kick-started with the aim to create a short tail dragon eye pearlscale. I crossed a good bloodline of calico short tail dragon eyes to the highly inbred and stable line of short tail pearlscale from Malaysia. Four batches were spawned using different combinations of related parental stocks. Their bloodline information were tracked separately.

Short tails being recessive and in the first filial generation (F1), all of them are short tails. However, all lack the dragon eyes as it is a recessive gene. The short tail and the dragon eyes are both recessive homozygous genotype following the Mendelian Complete Dominance Rule with the following Punnett Squares :

For the short tail:
Result: All short tail F1 with homozygous recessive alleles for short tail: t

For the dragon eyes: Result: All normal-eye F1 with heterozygous recessive allele for dragon eye: e

For the pearl scale:

The pearl-scale trait follows the Mendelian Incomplete Dominance Rule:

Result: some F1 offsprings exhibit the phenotype that resembles a sort of blending between the normal scale and the pearl scale. The quality of the pearl-scale is inferior to the scale quality of their pearlscale parent.

Pictures:
1) Breeder stocks - short tail pearlscales from Malaysia

2) Breeder stocks - short tail calico dragon eyes from China
3) F1 - all normal eyes with inferior quality pearl scales
4) close view of incomplete dominance - bad quality scales with small pearl features