Short Tail Dragon Eyes Pearlscale 短尾珍珠龍 / 出目パール

種瓜得瓜﹐種豆得豆
You Shall Reap What You Sow.
~ A well-known proverb

With the few F3 fries having dragon eyes and pearl scale features, the next step is to linebreed/inbreed them to enhance these features. However, I had one problem – most of these breeder candidates are fully white as they are related to a fully white female in F2. Though a full white fish is not usually favoured by most oriental hobbyists, these individuals are quite unique with pink cheeks and bluish black eyes which the Vermillionians coined the term “Blue Berry Eyes”. The pink cheeks are due to the colour of the gill filaments showing through their transluscent gill plates.

Since the best specimens in F3 are mostly white, I had no choice but to breed these fishes to enhance the breed characteristics I desire. This result in more than 90% fully white fishes with blushing cheeks and blue berry eyes! The pearlscale features are more stable now but still, the scale quality is not up to my expectation.

The breed standard I have in mind for stage #1 is a cute short tail fish with gorgeous dragon eyes, neat pearl scales, roundish body and balance swimming. In fact, there are still many more refine details to tune. The tail angle, tail size, body shape, and shape of the eyes are still unstable. I come to realize that stabilizing the line features is the next daunting task of the new variety project.

A sampling of various spawn combination shows that it is imperative to improve on the scale quality and add in more calico patterns before going on further. The best pearl-scaling comes from a line of Calico Crown Pearlscales from China. With this in plan, I waited for a few months for the opportunity to acquire some of these Calico Crown Pearlscales to cross with the F3.

In doing this, I am re-scrambling the genetic alleles again where I am back to the stage of getting long tail and normal-eye progenies. I know that if I inbreed these fishes, I will get back my short tail dragon eye pearlscales again. Would they have the crown like the Crown Pearlscales? Wouldn’t it be too heavy on the headset which is already heavy with the dragon eyes? I can only tell in another 4 to 5 months time…


Video:
Blushing Blueberry Dragon Eyes Pearlscale babes

Pictures:
Two of the seed Calico Crown Pearlscales