Update on my Cow Ranchu projects. I use a female with two males separately.
This is the first match, the female and the male:
I bought the female from a local farm and I do not know whether it is a local breed or an imported fish. My guess, it is an imported fish. The male is my own offspring. I have a feeling that they are from the same lineage (I mean, their parents / grandparents might come from the same farm in China).
And this is the second match, where the female is the same fish:
The male is an imported fish from Chine (through Vietnam, as I was told). It is sold with the label of milk cow since its white color seems to be free from bluish shadow. So, it is safe for me to assume that the female and the male come from different farm lineage in China.
And their offspring shows different results!
These are the offspring from the first match:
They are dominated by the white (or pink) fishes. Some develop red color to become calico. Some have black patches, some black dots. And the black coloration grows. None are purely white (or Casper the ghost) – all have some hints of black coloration. I have high confident that they will be beautiful color as the melanin develops more intense.
Here are some close ups:
But the second match shows different result:
There are the white (pink) with hints of black pigments as well as the calicos. But there are also the Casper (without any black pigment in the body), the Tiger (with red pigment dominates the body), and also three more unidentified variants.
This is the Casper:
This will be the Cow, I guess:
This is the Calico:
This is the Tiger, and I am sorry I forget to take the topview picture:
These two are the first unidentified variant. They have white and purplish coloration with black dots:
These two puzzles me, since they have green color (like wild fish) but with some part of the body being purplish. And their scalations are transparent:
And the last one is similar to the previous two but without any purplish color. And at first, I thought the color was metallic scale with wild color. But now it develops transparent scale in its stomach, and the metallic scalation becomes blur. I am not sure how will it develops:
For me, it is interesting to see that these two matches produce different result. It shows that many fishes labeled as Cow Ranchu might carries different genes. Some can yield true cow coloration (with small percentage of calico) just like my first match, but some can produce all sorts of transparent scale variations as the second match shows.
The greenish ranchu is another interesting case to watch. I am enthusiastic to see what they will become. Will they produce interesting color? Or will they be just dull coloration subject to cull out?
hermantogoldfish 