I have started these project probably more than 6 months ago. What I did was to cross a sideview ranchu with a chocolate pompom. My wish is to get the chocolate color from the pompom. The final result is to get a chocolate ranchu, or better still, a chocolate and white ranchu!

The result of the first cross was orange, long tail, bald head with little pompom goldfish with under-developed dorsal. Concerning the body shape, some come with normal dorsal fins, but they are not what I wanted. They are being culled out. The ones with abnormal dorsal fins are what I wanted in this stage, which I have already posted under the title “Sea Horse” in this blog. Concerning the orange color, it is expected, since I assume that the chocolate color is recessive to the orange color. So far so good. I was thinking that I only need to raise them to be mature parents, and I can mate F1 x F1 to produce chocolate semi ranchu goldfish.

Complication arose when I found out that all of the F1 were females. Now, I must find another way to continue this project.

My best available solution is to cross the F1 back with the chocolate pompom again. The result will be 50% chocolate color theoretically. But the long tail genetic and the pompom genetic will also get stronger, which are undesirable to create my goal. And the dorsal genetic will get stronger also, which will give me a lot of chocolate goldfish with normal dorsal. These are undesirable, but I might still be able to sell them. What I want here is chocolate goldfish with defected dorsal.

So, I crossed these two fishes about a week ago, one day earlier than my panda ryukin parents:

These are the offspring:

As you can see, some show darker color and some lighter color. I will cull out the darker color. The lighter color will be chocolate.

I have done my first culling, which was the color culling, in day 5 since hatching. These picture are taken two days ago, the day when the first culling began.

The next step in this project is to cross the chocolate (with defect dorsal fins) with sideview ranchu once again, which can be done as early as 6 months from now.