170 replies to this topic

[Dr_Pat]

I'm fairly sure I'd get laughed out of the course if I ever referenced it. But I firmly agree with the idea that absence of proof is not proof of absence and with the idea that when we subject a species to different environments (as we do when we rip them out of their natural habitat and stick them in a glass box) we all subject them to previously unencountered selective criteria....which all the darwinists know has the potential to lead to another phenotype. (which I assume is where you were heading with the transcripition/translation and mutation point?)

[werdna]

Feed back from my unit lecturer regarding our last assignment
The Unit Outline also makes it clear that Wikipedia is not to be used either, yet students are still citing material from Wikipedia. It is NOT an authorised reference tool for academic work.

Silly billies, if you use wiki, you dont reference wiki, you refer to one of the references on the bottom of the wiki page!

Anyway... back on track now. I dont trust a fish without a complete latin name, but I dont particularly like the look of marbled species either, thats why you dont see one in any of my tanks.

Edited by werdna, 07 June 2011 - 08:41 AM.

[Den]

I should point out that I am reffering to the bulk imported fish which is the main source of most of our marbled peacocks and not whatever is created in aquariums here, as whats made here can be variable due to small aquariums filled with mixed species that are commonly kept by many hobbiests.

I believe given the clear lack of evidence that the imported fish should be considered as a manmade colour varient by the club, and not a hybrid.

PS. please note this thread is about wether there is evidence of marbled peacocks being hybrids, not about wether you like them, or about wiki, or about your favourite pair of shoes, thanks for keeping on track.


Cheers
Den

[werdna]

Sorry I went off topic Den.

The club doesnt view the fish as a hybrid, otherwise it would be banned, which it isnt.
The reason it doesnt view the fish as a hybrid is because of the reasons you have brought forward.

However, technically speaking, if there is no evidence of these fish ever occuring in the lake, and there is no full latin name, how is allowing them on the forum preserving the Aulonacara species?
Binomial nomenclature is used in identifying living things for two reasons. Its clarity and stability. It is no longer clear what this fish is, so it cannot be trusted.
I dont like theories, I like proof, one of the reasons why I hate people posting a pic of a fish asking what it is and then selling it later.

If you really believe they arent a hybrid, why dont you go and find the evidence to support your theory. As you said, not everyone is online and posts breeding stories, so I guess you are going to have to fly to where these fish first originated and start looking into their source of origin. Once done, you can then provide the evidence that they arent hybrid. But by googling information on the species and reading a couple of books and comparing them to your experiences in breeding a completely different fish that is mixed between different fish of different genus you havent provided enough evidence to support your theory.

[Blackcats]

Interesting article here :

The OB Peacock

Not sure exactly what proof the author has in his opening sentence regarding its suspected hybridisation !

I guess we will never know for sure.

Harry

[Den]

If you really believe they arent a hybrid, why dont you go and find the evidence to support your theory.

The evidence is already for us to see, as I have already explained,

take a look at the large batches of imported peacocks, they dont show any signs of having zebra genes in them, when making hybrids through cross breeding you cant perfectly cherry pick a colour gene and put it into every offspring, because when you hybridise fish you get a gene soup of both species, so if they were hybridised with zebras then we should expect to get some zebra shapes in some of each batch, if they were hybrids this would be unavoidable, but there is no zebra shapes coming through, hence the evidence that they were not crossed with a different genus.

I should go on the record saying that I initially thought they were a hybrid, but after my experiences with hybrids in the flowerhorn hobby I believe that the normal evidence that comes with hybridisation it is not there for the marbled peacock.

Cheers
Den

Edited by Den, 07 June 2011 - 12:06 PM.

[werdna]

Actually you have provided a theory that the fish is not a hybrid of two different genus through personal experience and research (although you have not cited any references).
You have not provided any evidence that the fish is not a cross between two different Aulonocara species.

If you could say, for example, that the fish was a mix of A. stuartgranti sp. "Chinuni" and A. stuartgranti sp. "Ngara", so all OB peacocks are A stuartgranti and show how you have come up with this, then you have evidence the fish is not a hybrid.

If you cannot tell me what species of Aulonocara it is, you havent supplied any evidence at all, you have come up with a theory, then come on here and asked people to prove you wrong.

To be honest, you may think the wiki thing was going off topic, but it was brought up because of referencing, which you havent done.
Also, my personal opinion does make a difference to my argument, because my theory is biased towards my opinion.
You say your opinion has changed due to your research, ok, provide reference material.

Edited by werdna, 07 June 2011 - 12:16 PM.

[Bowdy]

Hey Den does your theory apply to dragon blood/ fire fish peacocks also.

[Den]

Hey Den does your theory apply to dragon blood/ fire fish peacocks also

Hi Bowdy, the consequences of hybrising fish is not "my theory", its a general fact, when you make a billion gene combo soup from two different genera you cant just clean it up so easily, its like trying to make a vegitarian dish from a bowl of beef stroganof by throwing it against a wall and hoping the meat seperates away from the vegetables somehow.

Let me introduce a word here "consistent" once you create a hybrid, throw consistent out the window, you have a scamble egg omlet of genes, what we see with imported marbled peacocks is consistent peacock shapes and features, such as head, mouth eyes, fins, etc.

Let me give you a basice example of passing traits on, if you have brown hair and your wife has blonde hair, what are the chances that if you had 10,000 children that you could make them all have brown hair? chances are you will get some blondes as well, right? and if satan steps in you could get some red heads too, now times the complexity by a billion when talking about hybridising fish, if you've crossed two different species from different genera you cant just cherry pick out one gene like that as far as Im aware(please provide examples if you know of such a fish where this has been done? none come to mind for me?), unless of course you do it manually through bio engineering, where you manually select the genes you want and put the selected genes in the host animal/s.

So theres a search for you guys, find a hybrid fish(cross genera/not interspecies) that breeds true, where a single selected trait has been cherry picked, if you can find such a fish, then theres a chance the manmade peacocks could be hybrids, but if you cant find one, and you find like I find that cross genera hybrids cannot consistently breed true to either form, then the evidence is as stands and they are likely to be a selective bred natural strain and not hybrids.

Cheers
Den

Edited by Den, 07 June 2011 - 01:08 PM.

[aussiem01]

The first (marbled peacocks) came in as OBs but didnt breed true to parents colour and after several
generations faded into what we now know as marbled.After discussing this with Ad Konings he did say he had not seen
any ob(marbled peacocks) in all of his diving adventures

[Mr_docfish]

Interesting article here :

The OB Peacock

Not sure exactly what proof the author has in his opening sentence regarding its suspected hybridisation !

I guess we will never know for sure.

Harry

Well this article is something that brings me to a topic that relates to this whole discussion......

If you read the beginning of it, the author suggests (without proof) that the marble peacock originated from a male peacock and a female Mbuna...... how does he know this?? well..... due to the lack of understanding of genetics and limited knowledge of other fish around him (the author) he has made this assumption by himself due the fact that most Mbuna (eg: estherae, trewavase, fuelleborni, macrothalmus etc) only have females that exhibit the OB gene (sexual dimorphism).... there are only a couple of localities of zebras that show OB traits in both sexes... so due to the lack of understanding, he would have thought that in order to pass on this OB trait to a peacock, one would have to breed it with a female mbuna, as it was the only sex that showed the OB trait.... how simple Americans are huh?

And on this subject -

AQIS (on information passed onto them by SEWPaC - their advisory body) have now decided that the importation of Marble peacocks into Australia is no longer allowed due to the fact that SEWPaC have read comments on forums that suggest (no, insist) that marble peacocks are transgenic hybrids (hybrids from two different genera).... and hybrid fish are not allowed into Australia.

Funny enough, SEWPaC have quoted two references from the net, including the one above, and the following one:
http://www.bostonaqu...n/peter0799.htm

if you read this one carefully - take note of the intelligence of the individual that SEWPaC have quoted here - he states "He will show off his colors to anyone who takes the time to look into his tank including my cat Ginger whom he seems to be fond of!"

He either takes too much vallium with his cup of tea, or he is from the 70's LSD revolution.... and yet, our government departments that make the rules have used this information as one of two references to prove their point that these fish are hybrids, so we are no longer allowed to import the fish, therefore losing a small amount of revenue.... keep in mind that they will not stop here.... they will continue to use forums as a source of information to stop other fish such as livebearers, discus and a host of other fish that dont quite look right..... SEWPaC have already made a few new changes to the import list, and have quoted internet forums again.... it is becoming a habit by them to use this (at times) mis-information to assist them to strangle the hobby even further.

Might as well tell the Government to use Wiki to help make decisions on what to do with out taxes....

Back to the topic though....

.... look at the evidence - OB genes are a product of inbreeding and can often only be seen in captivity because this trait can be easily found and enhanced by human intervention. Just because it has not been seen in the wild, dose not mean it cannot happen in captivity. A hybrid between an aulonocara and a mbuna will result in a deformation of the body structure, particularly the head - none of the marble peacocks being imported show this. Norm Halliwell has narrowed the lineage of the marble peacock (originally formed from a leucistic form, or known as a tangerine form of peacock) to individuals in Sydney which I was told was during the late 70s or early 80s - http://auscichlids.c....php?topic=3637

The notion that the marble peacock is a hybrid is based on assumptions aimed at discrediting this colour form of fish as it does not conform to a purists taste.... the idea that the fish is a colour mutation is based on actual occurrences in other fish and animals, and is therefore the most plausible possibility of its origin.

Edited by Mr_docfish, 07 June 2011 - 10:23 PM.

[Poncho]

The post you link to raises more questions than it answers - in fact it doesn't answer anything but seems like an excuse to have a go at flowerhorns and blood parrots - totally irrelevant.

So,
If marbled peacocks were created by Australian breeders in the late 70's, how did they end up all across the world? Were they exported from Australia? Seems unlikely but what would I know - I was still in nappies then.
How is the link you posted up more credible than the link from cichlid-forum Blackcats posted? Both are unreferenced and full of opinions.
Still questions unanswered- if marbleds were created by breeders in Sydney, why didn't they call them marbled Aulonocara "species from which they were derived"?
and, why haven't other peacock breeders come across a marbled mutation?

Aussiem01 now says that the originals (under a different name) did not breed true. I have heard this before and I have no reason not to believe what aussiem is saying even though I only know of him through his good reputation as a peacock fanatic - as good reputations are hard to create but easy to destroy. That raises another question in my mind - why were they once called OB and then changed to marbled? Perhaps because they were considered hybrids because they didn't breed true and so labelled differently to try and escape that stigma?

Another question, how do we know they are actually breeding true and that the odd weird head shape that pops up isn't just being culled by breeders and dismissed as an occasional deformity?

You can call me sheep-minded or whatever you want but given what reputable breeders are saying and the unanswered questions regarding these fish, an inquisitive hobbyist would logically start to question the lineage of these fish. That's not sheep minded, that's not being completely gullible and just accepting what is served out by the commercial fish breeders. I don't believe this stigma has been placed on the fish because it is not a text book example but rather because things aren't transparent and look just a bit too fishy.

[Mr_docfish]

If marbled peacocks were created by Australian breeders in the late 70's, how did they end up all across the world? Were they exported from Australia? Seems unlikely but what would I know - I was still in nappies then.

It is possible that individuals were taken overseas and spread since then, or it is more likely that this colour form was produced in a similar manner overseas due to the same reasons as described above (eg: inbreeding).

I can give you an example of one fish that recently got spread to SE Asia from Australia...

About 14 years ago, I got hold of a couple of gold white clouds minnows (obtained from a friend - Ken Shaw) which originally came from a guy in Queensland. I only got males, and they showed serious issues from too much inbreeding (lack of developed dorsal fins) so I crossed these with normal female whiteclouds, then crossed back to get the gold gene to show in the babies.... I then sent males only over to Melbourne, from where the same process was repeated, and someone over there sent the fish to Indonesia.... now I buy gold whitecloud minnows from Indonesia... and now gold longfins are becoming available in limited numbers... This is a perfect example of how an inbred fish produced a lutino freak, and from there, was passed onto breeders in SE Asia to produce in larger numbers....

Also, when I worked for a fish exporter in Singapore, I bought my collection of killifish with me, and I sold 3 pairs of Gardneri to a breeder that came passed who bought them back to Indonesia to breed them.... this is the same guy who breeds the gardneri that we now see in shops in Oz at a cheap price....

So getting fish developed in Oz and shipped out to SE Asia is easy, and very possible - I know of two occasions during my time in this industry - only because I was involved..... unfortunately, I was not involved in the marble peacocks....

However, my Boss at the time back in the late 80s got the first shipment of marble peacocks in WA from Singapore... they were poorly coloured and weak - just what one would expect from inbreeding - not the hybrid vigour one would expect like you get in platies crossed with swordtails.... it was not until the mid 90s that marbled peacocks started to come in better colours through mixing with other peacock varieties. This much is possible. The introduction of mbuna genes to get the OB or marble colouration could be a likely scenario, but the sequence of events does not support this, nor does the physical characteristics of the fish show this.

How is the link you posted up more credible than the link from cichlid-forum Blackcats posted? Both are unreferenced and full of opinions.

The opinions are a personal communication between Norm Halliwell and the breeders mentioned - Norm has been in the Australian fish keeping trade for a hell of a lot of years.....

Still questions unanswered- if marbleds were created by breeders in Sydney, why didn't they call them marbled Aulonocara "species from which they were derived"?
and, why haven't other peacock breeders come across a marbled mutation?

This information was lost in time - most breeders of the time did not care too much for detail, and there was no means of delivering this information to the masses like we have now..... if you were born 20 years earlier, you would understand - for example, 20 years ago, I used to have to write an article and mail it to a magazine editor to have it published in a magazine which was posted to a limited number of people in a limited area - now I just post it up here for the whole world to see..... this is something that will be forgotten in time....

The lutino gene is caused through a mixup during DNA/RNA replication which can occur randomly at any time - and there is a slim chance that it can be seen phenotypically, but this increased through inbreeding (decreased gene pool). And often, it goes unnoticed and the odd individual gets eaten.... see albinos for example...

why were they once called OB and then changed to marbled?

It is one in the same - Orange blotch/Marmalade/Marbled.... all derived from or related to lutino/tangarine/gold forms...

Another question, how do we know they are actually breeding true and that the odd weird head shape that pops up isn't just being culled by breeders and dismissed as an occasional deformity?

The SE Asians dont bother culling the odd balls... to them, odd balls are considered good luck (double headed/balloon/Longfin) and from my experience, 90% of breeders in Oz dont cull minor oddities - so odd head shapes would still be evident.... I import 1000s of peacocks of all sorts (including REAL species) and I have never seen anything that could be related to Mbuna traits..... in fact, I cant get OB or marbled mbuna from the exporters in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.... they dont breed them there....

You can call me sheep-minded or whatever you want but given what reputable breeders are saying and the unanswered questions regarding these fish, an inquisitive hobbyist would logically start to question the lineage of these fish. That's not sheep minded, that's not being completely gullible and just accepting what is served out by the commercial fish breeders. I don't believe this stigma has been placed on the fish because it is not a text book example but rather because things aren't transparent and look just a bit too fishy.

So if I told you that the gold whitecloud was developed by crossing a normal whitecloud and a gold leopard danio..... would this be more true? or did my previous story above sound more convincing? If I told you these two possibilities in the opposite order, would my story above sound more like a old wives tale? Same situation, different fish, different generation.... I hope you can understand.

Cheers
Oliver

Edited by Mr_docfish, 08 June 2011 - 08:35 PM.

[Poncho]

Thanks for the response

So if I told you that the gold whitecloud was developed by crossing a normal whitecloud and a gold leopard danio..... would this be more true? or did my previous story above sound more convincing? If I told you these two possibilities in the opposite order, would my story above sound more like a old wives tale? Same situation, different fish, different generation.... I hope you can understand.

Both sound as plausible as each other to me as an average hobbyist no matter what order you told me. It's the same with the story that marbled peacocks are hybrids or that they are linebred mutations of an Aulonocara species - both sides have just as much creedence to me as both stories make assumptions somewhere along the lines and fail to provide the whole story. So a leap of faith is required if you are to form a concrete opinion either way - something the PCS has not done, which I think is the best move. I understand what you're saying about information being lost due to a different time and therefore the missing information is not necessarily missing because someone is trying to hide something. But that means I have to have trust in what you are telling me over what Marc Ellison from cichlid forum is telling me, who may be as big a fish keeping veteran or experienced an importer as yourself and Norm Haliwell. I don't understand how a club can make a firm decision either way with two contrasting stories, both without concrete evidence.

As a hobbyist and a "purist" or lover of naturally found forms of fish, my option is just to stay away from these fish and write the whole group of Aulonocara "trade name only" off as too messy to try and work out. If that demonises the fish when someone asks "what peacock species is my fish?", all the better for me because hopefully it will mean more focus within my circles on the fish that I like, rather than the easier to sell varieties.

One more question if you'll humour me. Admittedly, you say they have now been mixed with various peacock species to improve colour. Technically this is hybridising the fish if you accept that there is more than one species of peacock. Is this something that is common knowledge, documented or can be proven without a shadow of doubt?

[crash812]

isn't the Marbled Peacock an OB Morph ????

Edited by crash812, 09 June 2011 - 07:30 PM.

[Mr_docfish]

isn't the Marbled Peacock an OB Morph ????

same same...

One more question if you'll humour me. Admittedly, you say they have now been mixed with various peacock species to improve colour. Technically this is hybridising the fish if you accept that there is more than one species of peacock. Is this something that is common knowledge, documented or can be proven without a shadow of doubt?

cant prove it, but if you look at the evolving colours, you can see particular patterns.... obviously, there is more than one colour variant - could be different colours from different localities of A stuartgranti (so technically not a hybrid, but of mixed genetic localities) or from different species within the same genus.... no one will know.... this is more plausible than saying it is a mix of different genera just to get the OB/Marble effect .....

Either way, for purists, this is not a suitable species (hence the issue we are seeing now - anything that some purists (not yourself) can do to discredit it, will come out)... but for people coming into the fish keeping hobby - it is fish like the marble peacock that get their interest - keeping them away from marines and other fish, encouraging them to keep cichlids.... there is a market for these fish regardless....

[Hood]

There is an interesting article that I have translated from french on Oz Fish For Sale
That I think should be an interesting read when weighing into this debate. I would post it here but I am not allowed to link to Oz Fish For Sale
It concernes collection divers from both lakes Malawi and Tanganyika and comfirmed instances of them pulling and exporting OB, Albino and leucistic specimens from the lake.

[Ronny]

Can you link the French article so we can have a read?

[amber]

i had a male marbled peacock that bred with a female blue peacock 100% of them were marbled. So i'd say its a pretty dominant gene unless the blue female parents or theres were crossed with marbled.

[Hood]

Can you link the French article so we can have a read?

I checked the french site yesterday, it has since not paid for it's servers, so it is no longer there.
Seems that Oz Fish For Sale is the only place on the web it now exists. Maybe send me a PM on Oz Fish For Sale and I can give you the link thete mate. That seems to be the best I can do right now mate. ;D