The attempt I posted last week has resulted in an unwanted offspring. I was looking for defected dorsal. As the offspring enters the second week, I can see the dorsal part clearly:

This sample shows brown fishes with the complete dorsal. So, the crossing back to its pompom parent has resulted in normal dorsal offspring in majority. I can say that 95 percent have the normal dorsal. At this culling stage, I also cull the ones with single anal fin. This leaves me with zero fish with defect in dorsal. So, I do not get the result I want from this crossing. My project is in jeopardy.

Luckily, I have a back up plan. Some months ago, I have predicted this problem when I realized that all my F1 were female. So I did another crossing between ranchu and pompom just for back up plan. This second crossing provides me with male defected F1 I needed, carrying the chocolate genetic in the recessive. They are still very young, too young to breed, I think. They are about 4 months old now. Can breed, but still too young. But I take my chance. Now, I breed the mature F1 female from, with the young immature F1 males.

Compared to the previous attempt of crossing F1 with pompom, this crossing will yield more defected dorsal. Hopefully. But will also yield less chocolate color. So, hopefully there will be enough chocolate with defected dorsal for me to choose for the next parent.

The eggs hatched yesterday 🙂