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How Did I Get Yellows?


Celeste84

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i was looking at my 3 biggest girls from my mystery spawn today and i noticed red/YELLOW/black banding in the caudal and anal fins of one, instead of just the red/black as seems to be the prevalent colouring in this spawn, so i had a closer look at the girls, and one has a yellow body and pale fins, and the other has a yellow body/normal fins with light blue irid over it!

now i am totally stumped! how does what appears to be a deep black/red male DRCT and a red/dark bodied DR combtail female with light blue irid over her body produce yellows!

here's the biggest male (bob) he's almost an identicle match for his dad:

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(his fins are bright red IRL - the plastic i was taking the photo thru dimmed them)

here's a yellow girl:

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here's the yellow/blue girl:

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TBC

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and here's the tri-banded girl:

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here's a little boy (i think):

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sorry the colours are so pale, but in addition to the plastic, bob had been harassing them because they were barring up at the new copper/black lace male.

most of the males are taking after bob, but after carefully looking, one has the tri-bands in his anal fin, and another in both his anal and caudal! as a general rule for this spawn, the light bodied fish are females and the dark/black bodied ones are males.

any ideas on how i got this?? :cheer:

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were the parents from your local fish shop? if so, then their genetic make-up could be a hodge-podge of all diff genes. therefore giving u any colours I'll let someone explain how u exactly got yellow because I'm not that knowledgeable on red/yellow genes, only enough to know that you can get both red and yellow from the same spawn if both parents carry the non-red gene :cheer: HTH :)

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thanks, and yeah they were from the LFS ^_^;; the idea of this spawn was actually to get an idea of what their genetics were LOL but i didn't expect yellow because of the red fins! i always thought that to get yellow you had to have a complete lack of red on the fish because of the non-red gene - then again cambo's can throw yellows and they have red fins, so der me, i should have considered that :P

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like i said i was taking photos thru the plastic and they were stressed out :P;; i checked them again tonight and all the fins are bright red, black, etc... and that one little girl has a nice bright butter yellow body ^_^ i dunno how it got in there, but i'm going to try and get more pics once i manage to catch that bugger bob and put him back in his container.

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but if they were cambo, shouldn't the one with the yellow body have an entirely yellow body? the yellow doesn't extend to her head, she has a light brown head ^_^ but if it is, that made my life a lot easier :P i was after some cambo girls :P how come it really only affects the females? sure a male or two with a black body has some yellow banding, but, only the females have the light bodies and yellow colour on their body?

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They look like having some cambodian in them due to the lighter body. Not sure on the yellow though. I can't see it in the picture.

This link Yellow Cambodian is of some yellows that turned up in one of F3 Red spawn. There's been a lot of cellophane and butterfly patterns coming out of this particular spawn and then these three yellows. The female in the link is now a nice HM male ^_^ The yellow was a nice suprise though I'm not sure I wanted them or how they'll turn out if I spawn them. Something on the to do list.

I'm guessing they came about as a result of the red-loss gene in the red cambo line we've been breeding. So if your pair had the same cambo red loss gene then you could have yellow coming from that though it will get mixed up with all the blue.

Cheers,

Pat.

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thanks :P the yellow on the body of the second juvie in your pic is very similar to the colour on my little girl, but her body underneath is somewhat darker than your pretty fish :P so theoretically, if i spawn a male and a female showing yellow i'd have a good chance of throwing better cambo's then?? sorry for all the questions, but i want to know as much as i can about bettas ^_^

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here are some slightly better pics of buttercup (yellow body) and the tri banded girl. still very pale because they were photographed thru the plastic tub, sorry :lol:;; i'll try and get some proper pics of them in a glass tank sooner or later.

the yellow seems to be getting more pronounced every day, so maybe they aren't done colouring up yet??

also is buttercup still a yellow cambodian if she has red fins??

buttercup:

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tri banded:

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i know, but, what i meant is that all the other "yellow cambodians" i have seen have had yellow fins, so does buttercup still qualify as a yellow cambodian if she has red fins, or is she a cambodian with yellow wash, or a red/yellow light bicolour, etc.... :cheer:;;;

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she's just a "cambodian" (as commonly understood, meaning flesh coloured body and red fins, as opposed to 'blue cambodian' 'yellow cambidian' etc), IMO. Maybe in clearer photos she will look more yellow. It also appears that she has pineapple edging to her scales.

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Yellow is produced by the non-red gene. You can't have a fish that shows both red and yellow at the same time. The yellow is produced by a defective red gene which causes a breakdown in the metabolic pathway leading to the expression of full red colour. It is recessive to red and therefore will only be expressed if the fish has 2 copies of the non-red gene, and as a consequence, no normal red genes. A cambodian has a flesh coloured body with the fins coloured. Therefore yellow cambodian is flesh coloured body and yellow fins. The colour of a cambodian refers to the colour of its fins.

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i'll try and get some better photo's but one of the other fishies took a chunk outta her anal fin so she might get a bit stressed out :lookaround: and the yellow is sitting on top of a very light browny colour, so it's not a bright yellow, more of a butter yellow, but it is getting brighter. i've heard that there are two types of the NR gene? so maybe the NR genes affect body and fins seperately? then again that doesn't really explain the red and yellow on the fins of the other fish o.o huh. i'm confused now. anyway like i said i'll try and get some clear pics of her soon :cheer: o btw, i saw the most perfect pineapple VT in the store today! pure solid yellow from nose to the tip of his tail and a complete black edging to every scale with no smudging or blurring of the black. i drooled over him for a good ten minutes LOL

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i've heard that there are two types of the NR gene? so maybe the NR genes affect body and fins seperately? then again that doesn't really explain the red and yellow on the fins of the other fish o.o huh. i'm confused now.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes Celeste, There are 2 types of NR gene. The other type produces "orange". I'm curious to see clearer pics of the fins of the fish showing both red and yellow. :lookaround:

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You can't have a fish that shows both red and yellow at the same time. The yellow is produced by a defective red gene which causes a breakdown in the metabolic pathway leading to the expression of full red colour.

There was a really interesting thread called Yellow - some questions (can yellow and red co-exist?) in the Bettas4All colour genetics section. This showed photos of a number of fish from different breeders who'd produced marbled fish with both red and yellow pigments.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to refer to other fora here so I understand if any of the mods need to remove this post.

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You can't have a fish that shows both red and yellow at the same time. The yellow is produced by a defective red gene which causes a breakdown in the metabolic pathway leading to the expression of full red colour.

There was a really interesting thread called Yellow - some questions (can yellow and red co-exist?) in the Bettas4All colour genetics section. This showed photos of a number of fish from different breeders who'd produced marbled fish with both red and yellow pigments.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to refer to other fora here so I understand if any of the mods need to remove this post.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks for the link Peter; it certainly made interesting reading first thing in the morning! :P

It is apparent that you do get fish that phenotypically display both red and yellow and even orange at the same time despite what Mendelian theory would predict, i.e. this phenotype cannot exist because the red gene is dominant to its 2 known non red alleles and therefore, when red is expressed phenotypically in a particular Betta, yellow and/or orange, even if genotypically present, shouldn’t be expressed phenotypically in this specimen.

Clearly something else of a non-Mendelian nature is going on that needs to account for the fact that these fish expressing red and yellow and/or orange actually do exist.

The marble gene at this point in time seems to be the most likely "culprit" according to the anecdotal opinions being expressed in the European thread. I say anecdotal because the opinions don’t come from data obtained from controlled studies (there probably aren’t any, mind you I haven’t looked either) and so are based on the individual's observations, and by definition, other possible causes of the expression of red and yellow and/or orange in the same fish have not been controlled for.

The "theory" or more correctly "hypothesis" regarding the marble gene is that it is in fact a piece of DNA know as a transposon which can, over time, insert itself into the chromosome at different points, unlike your average more Mendelian gene which is fixed into position.

The hypothesis assumes that the marble gene is something that puts a spanner in the works and kind of stuffs up the workings of the various colour genes when it gets inserted into various places on the chromosome. This "jumping" of the marble gene disrupts the DNA or sequence of base pairs of a particular gene. The affected gene can no longer produce the "correct" protein/s it codes for and the gene's expression in the phenotype of the fish is affected. In the case of the red gene, the disruption of protein expression means that the metabolic pathway to the creation of the red pigment is disrupted somewhere and precursor colours like yellow and orange are produced in the cell instead. This also explains why marble fish can change colour over time.

What isn't so clear is whether the "disrupted" genes can actually produce the yellow and/or orange precursor colours or whether they just stop working and/or both possibilities exist. If the gene just stops working, then I imagine the fish would need to possess the NR gene genotypically as well, so that this gene could make the yellow/orange pigments. Otherwise the red would be replaced by clear areas.

Because the marble gene does not "jump" into the red gene in all of the fish's cells, some of the cells are therefore unaffected and continue to produce red while others that are affected will produce the yellow and/or orange colouration and hence we have the fish that displays both red and yellow and/or orange phenotypically at the same time.

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well that makes a kinda sense since the banding in the finnage of bettas (butterfly) was originally developed from the marble gene i think? so maybe these little guys have marbling that allows the red and yellow on the fins at the same time and the red/yellow bicolour on the little girl.

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