It seems that my writing activity is not as active as my breeding activity. There has been a lot of progress in my breeding projects that I have not updated here. Let me try to catch it up.

In this occasion, I would like to update my Oranda breeding project since it is my main priority this year. To continue the Diary number 7 about the cross between Purple Oranda and my Basic Oranda Material in order to improve the quality of my purple oranda, I have selected a pair of offspring (semi purple Oranda) as the main parent fish. They are mature right now and have been bred several times. These are their pictures (before and after):

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The fish above has grown big and becomes difficult to handle during hand-spawning. The body is strongly built. The tail wrinkles beautifully displaying the rose-tail style. The headgrowth has grown a little bit, but not impressive enough. This is the part that need to be improved still. Anyway, at this stage, I am satisfied with the quality so far. This female is productive. She is the main star during this year. I use her in several different projects. Let’s call her Helen the Oranda.

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This male is from the same batch as the female one. Strangely his red and black pigments grow. At first, I thought he was in a stressful condition. But that was not the case. I mated this male with the main female to produce improved Purple Oranda. But complication arose. Most of the purple oranda produced lost their purple color and turned into white fish. I must discard them. Right now I am left with only two purple offspring which seem to retain their color. Right now the offspring is seven centimeters in size. I will post them later when they are bigger. So, with only two purple offspring left, I cannot say that this project is succesful. I plan to redo this mating once again to see if I can get more purple ones.

From my crossing of the Basic Oranda Material with my blue oranda of the same age as above fishes, I am blessed with one male semi blue oranda. Its phenotype is red, of course. I mentioned this project in my previous posts but had never posted any picture. So, I do not have the “before” picture. This is the recent picture of him:

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The body is stout. The tail has some wrinkle genetics but it is not quite the same as the Helen the Oranda (the semi purple one). The headgrowth is slightly better than the result of the semi purple project. I mention this male because he is significant in producing my improved blue oranda. I mated this male with Helen which successfully resulted in improved version of my blue oranda. A small percentage of the offspring loses its blue pigmen but the majority are good. So, excitingly, the cross between the semi blue oranda and the semi purple oranda results in good blue oranda offspring. They are still young right now, roughly seven centimeters in size. I will update them later when they are bigger.

Concerning my brown oranda project, I mentioned my failure before. But this week, I have successfully crossed my previous version of brown oranda with Helen. I have lots of confidence of being successful, but it is too early now to claim that. I will update the result in the next several months.

One more thing. I have another female semi purple Oranda besides Helen. The color was grey, and now she turns totally black. I did not include her in my post number 7 at that time since I was not aware of her presence. I thought all have been mutated into red or red-white fishes. Only when I did the total water change I realize that there was one grey fish left. I was planning to cull her out, but right now she ends up as the only back up female from the semi purple project. Considering her strong black pigment, she might be a better candidate to produce purple color than Helen. Yet, she has slender body and weaker tail than Helen. I do not take her picture. I just think I need to mention her in case I use her in my project one day.

So, to conclude, the successful one at this point is the improved blue oranda project. The purple and brown ones still need to be repeated again. And another interesting side project involving Helen comes to mind which I will report in the next post. Please wait 😊