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Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 3:34 PM
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Over the years I have seen the gradual improvements in marine fish breeding success and with it the growth of hybridisation. This is being driven from two angles as I see it; 1) The need for commercial breeders to make a profit. 2) Man's curiosity which is unquenchable as we will always ask the question "what if". Some to greater extent than others. Now I know this has been discussed at length before on many forums, and I don't really want to start the right or wrong argument. However, our hobby has many facets and there are a plethora of sites across the internet, but none that are really tackling this issue. I would like to propose that consideration is given to setting up a seperate species list of hybrids on this site. In my opinion it's the best and where most value can be gained both in terms of understanding and most importantly documentation. As we all know there are many hybrids that occur in the wild some of which are taken into captivity more often than others. Leucokranos being one example. Im not suggesting that we promote this or award points, merely that it would be a great starting point for a centralised database for hybrids, and..............possibly where hybrids could have some provenance and traceability, captive bred or wild caught. I for one have hybrid pairs (SA Snow Onyx), Thiellei Leuc, and I think a seperate hybrid species listing would be useful. Thoughts anyone?
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 4:31 PM
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hmmm very excellent subject to look into here! I'll ponder and wait for Andy and MP to chime in as they are much more educated about the hybridization problems and considerations.
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 5:06 PM
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It is something that we have talked about actually several times. The hybrid issue is one the seems to polarize breeders the world over. Up to now it's been pushed off to the edges to work on over issues but we aren't going to be able to ignore the issue for longs. I agree with you that the MBI is probably uniquely suited to build such a database due to the system we already have in place.
Chad Penney - MBI Council Agis quod Adis
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 10:48 PM
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I've gone round and round on this topic and actually always have to start off with the following: 1. Hybrids create the potential for MANY problems as it pertains to breeders who have a conservation mindset. 2. People involved in hybridizing species to create new things are, to some extent, driven to do so not out of any conservation mindset, but out of a desire to create and utlimately, profit. I believe there are ways to create profit, and ways to innovate, that don't involve or require hybridization. Therefore, I do view the pursuit of hybrids as "lazy" innovation..there's nothing *new* or innovative about hybridizing two species of clownfish for example. They're still clownfish. They still pair and breed the same way. To take this approach is to reinvent the wheel. 3. While these arguments have counterpoints that from a business standpoint are valid, I'm concerned with the bigger picture. What businesses and individuals often overlook is that if we fail to preserve the foundation of species, we will lose what makes this hybrids in the first place. So even for the breeder who is enthralled with hybrids, they must have a respect for the natural species and varieties, the raw materials, that are used to create this man-made fish in the first place. 4. When wild fish are no longer available (yes, I've shifted from and if to a when, but that's simply a shift in opinion based on situations), we'll be left with whatever we've preserved. Ask yourself...do we want 50 types of clownfish and not much else, or do we want the 1500 or so species of marine fish we currently keep all to be preserved? I would guess the latter, as it is in the interest of BOTH parties. Which means that now is not the time to make hybrids, now is the time to do the real tough innovative work and lock down more species. 5. I have always said that when we're "done" with WC fish, by all means, pursue hybrids, because that IS the only way anything new or different will come about. 6. WHEN we pursue hybrids, we need to do it properly. Right now we are in the wild west of hybrids. The ORCHID hobby has 100 years experience on us. Almost every hybrid can be traced back completely to every founding species, primary and subsequent hybrids that got you where you are. Which means that should we LOSE that hybrid, but at some point wish to remake it later, we CAN do so because the lineage is recorded and the FOUNDING SPECIES are all preserved. So in the end, we need to adopt a model similar to the way the orchid people deal with hybrids, which includes a globally accepted single governing body (the Royal Horticultural Society, based in the UK) who handles the registration of ALL orchid hybrids. ONE source. ONE governing body. Yes, the MBI could take on that role, and there's already a model to follow. The PROBLEM I see so far is that AQUARISTS don't want that. They want to name their own hybrid their own thing, even if it's the same as someone else's. They want to claim propriety and not share such info, because if they hit on a real winner, better to keep everyone guessing so they have a competitive advantage. In the end though, we all LOSE. So in the end, there is little to gain at this time other than profits from the pursuit of hybrids, and that profit motive is, to some extent, further driven by the demand of an uninformed consumer base that will pay XXX more for something just because it is new and different, and has no clue or care for the intricate ramifications of what they push producers to do. Afterall, even though ORA did not set out to create the Indigo Dottyback, it's not like they've stopped producing them - they sell. So in the end, I'm fully willing to say that the MBI could and should take on the role of "registrar" for marine fish hybrids. It would be a great resource. Whether people would choose to recognize the MBI as the "defacto" registrar, or whether other orgs might prop up proposing that THEY in fact should be the registrar, are the big pitfalls of such an endeavor. I should also point out that in the Orchid World, it costs money (last time I did it, $8) to register a new orchid hybrid. That pays for the administrative costs of maintaining the DB. The MBI, as a Marine Breeder's Award Program for clubs and orgs around the world, probably should not seek to reward hybridizers for their efforts however. I believe that hybrids truly do create massive problems for breeders working to preserve natural forms (i.e. look at the recently shown Maroon Hybrids that have an uncanny similarity to straight up Ocellaris, and imagine how easy it could be for that fish to accidentally be used in a breeding project AS ocellaris, and what would that do to a breeder's attempts to produce nice quality ocellaris?) I am apt to dismiss that argument that any captive-bred fish is good for "species conservation" because it equates to one or more wild caught marine fish. That argument is true, but the benefit is offset by the additional risk that hybrids create. Freshwater Breeder Award Programs generally award little or NO POINTS for hybridizers, because in the end, these programs are aimed at promoting and preserving the plethora of rare and unique species that already don't have mass market appeal (i.e. a Goodied or odd Tanganyikan Shell Dweller). It is also generally accepted that many FW hybrids are abominations (i.e. the Parrot Cichlid) and shouldn't be promoted, lumping them in with other truly deplorable practices like the dye-injecting of fish.
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:10 AM
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I do agree that issuing points for a hybrid is certainly a problem. I don't think we really want to encourage or reward people for creating hybrids when there are so many true species out there that we haven't scratched the surface on yet. We do need to maintain our focus there. That said I also don't think that it is in the best interest of the hobby and captive breeding to ignore the issue of hybrid and marginalize it for very much longer. There are still many hurdles to overcome in making captive breeding of most species profitable. For commercial breeders to be able to have the capital to work on and research species that aren't profitable at this time they need to be able to sell easier species at higher prices. Creating hybrids is a way for these entities to do that. They can provide a unique product that they can charge a higher price than wild caught and make money. It's for this reason that it's simply not going to go away. Your mention of the hybrid maroons actually I think highlights this very well. In a case like there if there was some sort of registry that recorded that information then perhaps the chances of that maroon getting accidental bred with ocellaris might be reduced. Will the world accept the MBI as such an entity? I don't know, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But let's face it right now there is a vacuum and as Matt put it we are in the Wild West right now...Maybe the town needs a new sheriff!
Chad Penney - MBI Council Agis quod Adis
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:16 AM
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Chad Penney - MBI Council Agis quod Adis
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:18 PM
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I agree with the reasoning and sentiment in your argument Matt, but I think whilst we remain on the periphery we are merely observers and unable to influence, educate and encourage responsible breeding practice. After all each journey starts with a first step! Should the MBI be the first to take that step? The world we live in will always be driven by supply and demand, and one thing you can be sure of, hybrids will continue to become more popular as they become more available and cheaper. Another relevant point you make is that Orchid registration enables lineage and therefore provenance of all hybrids. This was not achieved overnight and someone had to start it. Also look at Kew and the amazing resource library of seeds they have there, its absolutely mind blowing! ( EDIT: Just realised many people may not know what Kew is. Kew Gardens are the Royal Botanical Gardens in London. They set up a millenium project to ocollect every known seed in the world and store them for the future. It is the largest project of it's kind anywhere in the world. Here's a link if your interested.) http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/save-seed-prosper/millennium-seed-bank/ So why not have a documented certification for fish we are already breeding? This could be a form documented by the MBI and given to customers of the breeder proving provenance. That way we could keep track of captive raised fish for the day that will probably come when wild caught fish numbers are reduced or stopped all together. The MBI would obviously have a charge for this to cover administration. OK, I know this sounds very involved and "pie in the sky" but I definitley think it's possible over time and as conservation pressures build. A Group like the MBI I feel, has enough passion to at least make a start at determining the process, or are we just observers?
<message edited by Duck on Wednesday, June 29, 2011 5:12 PM>
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:42 PM
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I'm fairly new here, but I really think MBI should look at adding hybids and award points for them. It's not a reward. It's so that others know about your knowledge and what you're doing for the hobby. There are several mass breeders of ocellaris and perc crosses and they are selling them for profit yes, but there was a lot of research that went into them being raised. I would hate to see someone else step up and do this before MBI and we lose out on being THE place to go for registry. If MBI doesn't do it someone else will. Yes there does need to be rules and regs and a heritage of the fish that they are breeding tracked and also be careful that people don't think they are breeding a clarki and thinking it's a perc. I know that's a stretch, but you get the point. If they don't know what they are breeding then how can they have a name for the babies? That's why this site has you post up pics of the parents. There's always more than one set of eyes on the brood stock to make sure that the fish are what they say they are.
RLTW 180 Gallon Mixed Reef Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!" Isaiah 6:8
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 5:10 PM
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hrmm loving this discussion. I'm on the road here and not exactly on my laptop so I'll give a quick simplified response and maybe follow up later if I need to. In short, I think that the idea of having a hybrid registry and having the reporting functions built without award points is a great idea. We can easily create either a schedule to review hybrid species for possible acceptance into point award status periodically (annually, etc.) or an on demand request feature. We would obviously need to work in the back end on a review process regardless and I suspect very few if any hybrids may ever pass the review. I do however support bringing hybrids into our database as hybrids and making sure we list and mark them as so as this will ease a lot of false reporting as this market gains popularity
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:05 PM
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The Marketplace actually a step in the this direction. For those of you that have not explored the Marketplace yet one of it's features is to load your brood stock and attach them to offspring. It's the start of a lineage tracking system.
Chad Penney - MBI Council Agis quod Adis
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:39 PM
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 7:17 PM
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I think there are two important things that I want to be clear of. If it is decided to tackle the hybrid issue chances are that points will not be awarded for them and certainly not on the same basis as pure species breeding attempts. The council is pretty united on in that regard. I just want to be up front with everyone and let everyone know that arguing is not going to change that. The real questions at hand are: - Do we allow information on hybrids to be logged in the MBI system ( Reports, you can already do journals )
- Do we create a way to register/name a hybrid and keep track of that information.
Both these things will require a great deal of work and in the case of #2 even more planning. On the order of the amount of planning that went into creating the original MBI system.
Chad Penney - MBI Council Agis quod Adis
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 2:21 AM
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I think this is a fascinating thread. So far, I entirely agree that the focus of MBI should remain primarily and solidly on the breeding and perpetuation of species. At the same time, hybridization is going to happen, and having a registry of marine fish hybrids with consistent naming of the hybrids ("grexes", if you will) would be a very good and useful thing, and something that should start sooner rather than later. MBI is an ideal candidate to become that registry. The analogy to the orchid world is imperfect, though, primarily because orchids interbreed across genus lines more readily than fish do (I believe). This allows for exponentially more possible grexes in the orchid world than in the fish world. My only point is that the complexity is somewhat reduced. There are probably other distinctions that Matt or Andy could come up with. I disagree that creating a fish hybrid registry would be a daunting task. To record a cross's two parents, and what the name of the cross is, is basically all that is required (together with the registrant of the cross and the date, perhaps). Now, to be able to VERIFY that a given cross is what the registrant says it is would be another matter. As far as I'm aware, the RHS doesn't require verification of the parentage of new orchid hybrids, aside from requiring a photograph of a primary hybrid. The information shown on the form in the link that Chad gave is just a handful of fields -- much less complicated than the MBI report forms are!
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 1:14 PM
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These days, for Orchids, you can have hybrids that consist of far more than simply one or two genera. I don't preceive that to be the case in Marine Fish..it seems that at least in the wild, hybrids are pretty much limited to the same genus, or at best, the only real intrageneric hybrids I'm familiar with have been Premas X other Amphiprion, which as it turns out shouldn't be so surprising given the genetic research that suggests that Ocellaris, Maroons, Percs and Latezonatus are much more closely related to each other than any other grouping of fish. Will we ever see a hybrid of Premnas X Chrysipetera? Possible, but highly unlikely. It's far easier to attempt a hybrid in the Orchid world...you can store pollen in the fridge, and mate selection is 100% up to the hybridizer...not the plants. In the orchid world, you do have to have bloomed the hybrid to register it. That can easily be 5 years after creation of it. You're right about the photographic requirements, but I think we're at a point in the world where we can certainly require photographic evidence for ALL hybrids, and yes, even the broodstock. WILD hybrids are also handled in the orchid world...i.e. I believe at least one Paphiopedilum "species" has been determined to be a naturally occurring hybrid. So too, the MBI's Hybrid Registry could be used to track and record WILD occurrences of hybrids, which would perhaps preclude them from being simply bought and named by the purchaser. Overall, the rules for orchids fit well for fish. The modern requirements of proof in the MBI BAP would work well for marine fish. The rules of precedence dictate that there is one originator, and the first person to register with proof is the one who gets the credit, and that name, once approved (pretty much by virtue of not being confusing or otherwise already used) is the one that we all use. Indeed, it IS pretty easy. In the world of fish, we will primarily deal with "primary" hybrids. Here is the PROBLEM. In the world of fish, we have seen that this isn't limited to species hybrids, but also mixes of different variations. I.e. the "Black Ice" or the "Snow Onyx". We could one day see a "Blue Dot Lightning Maroon" or "Gold Strike Maroon" developed. So it's not just species that we're dealing with, and that's where everything breaks down. Because in truth, a "Black Photon" is NOT the same as a "Percularis", even though the parental species are the same. So we'd have to track one additional level in...the "cultivar" level. The naming conventions around that are already well established, but the registry of "cultivar" crosses is a bit more complex. In truth though, I think it could simply be managed by treating each "cultivar" as the finest level...which means that technically even a regular old Percula X Picasso Percula might have it's own "name"...or it might not. Afterall, A. percula X A. percula "Albino" will yield more A. percula and could or could not yield Albinos as well. A. percula X A. percula "Picasso"....will we get "B Grade Picassos" and straight up Percs, or could we get full blown "A Grade" Picassos out of the mix? It can get pretty complicated when you realize that the results of a crossing may not be consistent. So for that, I would turn to another interest group - Ball Pythons. In that interest group, they have a pretty good understanding of the genetics in play, and they know that if you cross X with Y, you may get X, Z, ZZ and YZ, all of which have their own names. Considering that "Picasso Perc X Picasso Perc" may yeild "Picasso and Platninums", and you'll see how they're all still within the same species, but the results have different names and phenotypes. It can get pretty messy in some respects, and that's where the real issues of creating a DB to track all this could wind up being more difficult. Still, I think that it is manageable if we treat the "cultivar" as the base unit....so when a new "cultivar" is created, it would get entered as a new base unit to use. Matt
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 1:33 PM
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I can state for certain that I get the whole gamut from every batch of Picasso offspring from my pair. Normal (slow) barring Percs, normal 3 bar Percs (fast barring, similar to Occys), all grades of Picassos, 70-80% white like Doni's Snowcassos, and 95% white Platinums.
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 2:29 PM
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I also think that scientifically it would be very interesting and informative for us to understand if indeed hybrids are able to produce viable offspring. If so what hybrid crosses? I am aware that in Thiellei and leukocranos, wild hybrids in capativity have never been successfully raised to any extent, although crosses of sandracinos and "an other" have. So what do we actually know about hybrids in captivity and their fecundity? How many F2's of hybrids are there? I see a real opportunity here to do some great work in collating these facts.
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 2:45 PM
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I have held onto a pair of Platinums for breeding purposes. I'll let you know in a year, or so, what happens. 
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Thursday, June 30, 2011 2:53 PM
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Haha...My Leuc, Thielei pair whilst eating plent the female Leuc certainly doesn't look like she is going to spawn anytime soon. The male Theilei gets fatter than she does. I personally don't think she will spawn, even though the male spends all day cleaning a spot in the pot she very rarely takes an interest. On the other hand my Snow Onyx pair are the most fanatical courtship pair I have ever seen, but they eat so little. Barely enough to keep them healthy let alone breed.......Ahhhhhh.......Time and patience.
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Friday, July 1, 2011 7:43 AM
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 Originally Posted by Duck I also think that scientifically it would be very interesting and informative for us to understand if indeed hybrids are able to produce viable offspring. If so what hybrid crosses? How many F2's of hybrids are there?
At least two examples of this already exist. Joe Lichtenbert spawned F1 White Tip Clownfish (polymnus X sebae), and that mating (White Tip X White Tip) produced viable F2 offspring which we'd also consider "White Tips". A second example would be Sanjay's Half Black Photons, which were a Black Photon (Onyx Perc X Black Ocellaris) backcrossed to one of the parents (I can't remember which one at the moment), with the resultant F2, HalfBlack offspring being "75%" one species, and "25%" the other. FWIW, Matt
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Re:Hybridisation , documentation and control?
Friday, July 1, 2011 1:37 PM
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Perhaps we should diferentiate here the offspring of very next of kin "sibling"species which should be fertile; from the others,which might not be. Polymnus/sebae share the same meristics and intergrade at Bali.Also hybrids within the same tribe,tomato/melanopus,ocellaris/percula or my Chrysiptera parasema/hemicyanea.
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