First published in May, 1953 of the Aquarium journal (Volume XXII, No.5), the article is sought and shared by Mr. Robert Ellermann to the hobby. The article mentioned about a variant of lyretail swordtail, which developed a "true" upper sword at caudal fin. Unfortunately, the strain has never been established. Different from Kings lyre and Common lyretail, there's only the extension of upper caudal fin rays in Double sword variant (all other fins were not elongated). While common lyretail trait shows up in early juvenile age, both Double sword and Kings lyre traits proceed to express after sexual maturation. In general, the double sword phenotype seems to have longer and thicker upper sword than in Kings lyre. So, you shouldn't mistake a double sword swordtail to those common fin individual carrying a pseudo sword which would not breed true at all. For further reference:
The Double swordedtail @ platys.net
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This morning, I come home and found 2 precious Kohaku females (about due date) jumped out of their tank. What a sad news, but fortunately beautiful sunny day today has saved me from any gloomy feeling. Immediately, I go ahead performing C-section to those females to observe their fry's phenotype. The first female on C-section was virginly matched with a comet tail swordtail. This male was born to my pure Kohaku Koi and Hi-fin non-albino Koi male swordtail from Petu. The fact that he developed comet tail phenotype (another black bar on the upper edge of the tail) gained my interest and I would like to reproduce his phenotype for hobby. But to my surprise, majority of his frys could be easily told to have wag tail (see the picture below) and still have tiny chance of surviving after mother's fatality. So, why this comet tail phenotype produce all wag tail in offspring? I will try to cross this male to a Ruby Red female next time to see if a similar result would happen. Update on Jul 08, 2016 Thanks to Dr. Levine for his explanation on my question: "Wagtail is normally a combination of the Co (comet) gene from maculatus platies and the E gene originally found in swordtails. If this comet-tailed male is the father and the babies are all wags, then the female must have carried two copies of the dominant E gene. I’m assuming that the female was neither comet-tailed nor wag." Then, why Co gene appeared in the father swordtail when his parents never showed any comet phenotype? And the E gene that Dr. Levine have mentioned is actually standing for "Extender" - a gene modifier originated in swordtail. It modify Co gene creating phenotype of fin rays and lip (Wag phenotype) of the fish solid black. So, it does not have any effect without Co gene existence (from Ephie's blog). To an extend, there's another black fin The second albino Koi female paired with the comet tail male above also gave birth to all wag. Mr. Mefford also reported to have Wag offspring from his cross of Bleeding Heart Platy with The Comet pattern to a plain White "Ghost" Hifin Platy. Interesting! Tonight, I felt great to have a chance talking to a new friend named Ken whereas in our conversation, I found out that Ken by chance did a magical thing - discovered kings-lyre trait from his swordtail cross breed. What Ken did is he crossed a Rio Otapa male swordtail (wild type, black markings) to an Albino high fin red mother [P], and the result turned out more than surprise when 6 kings-lyre males appeared in the offspring [F1] out of about total 20. So, the ratio of kings-lyre male in his F1 is about 25%. Plus, he reported to have 2 females, 1 with long lower sword as the regular male swordtail, the other (a high fin female) has a short sword. Isn't that interesting? Unfortunately, the parents didn't survive long enough to carry more births. And the long sword female had died from bacterial infection while being isolating for delivery. Those pictures below provided by Ken. The first 4 pictures are from a kings-lyre male, and the picture #5 is the female sibling with a long lower sword. I know that some of you would ask what is kings-lyre swordtail and may find it confused if having to tell the different between regular lyre swordtail and kings-lyretail. This is what I learned from Rainer about kings-lyre in comparison to regular lyre swordtail:
- KL has uneven pair of sword and the upper sword is much shorter than the bottom sword. - All fins are elongated as in regular lyre, except the gonopodium (sex organ) of the male swordtail is short, thus letting him be breedable in a very natural way. - Also, Rainer suggested that female swordtail born to a king-lyre may has bottom sword protruding from its tail. For further detail of his observation, please refer to Rainer's website. I also added some pictures below to help you with a general idea of how a kings-lyre should look like. |
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