First let me update the offspring of Mr. DBS line in my place. Since it has become the basic ingredient for my tosakin project, I see the need to preserve it. Here are two very different siblings from this line:
My purpose in this tosakin project is to create tosakin with deep red color. I have posted this in the diary #11 this year. From my crossing to get a deep red color, I get two surprises which I have not posted before.
The first one is a red-white fish with a better red color (though not so intense yet) which has a tail shape closer to a decent tosakin (with a shorter tail). But I do think this fish is the key that will bring me one step closer to my goal. That is why I named her the Key. She looks like this:
In the pond, the red color is a bit more intense than this picture. Somehow, I cannot get the color right during my photo session. But the color difference is visible when she is paired with the DBS line as shown below:
I do think that the cross between the DBS line (male) and the Key (female) will produce a decent tosakin with better coloration. So, I mated the Key with several male from DBS line. These are the male fishes:
The one on the right is not the DBS line. He is the deep red semi tosakin fish. I mated him with the Key to preserve the intense red color to be used for the next step of the project. I cannot wait to see the result!
The second surprise is the appearance of a different kind of tosakin. The characterstics are a softer tail, but longer. And a better red color than the DBS line. I do not recall what crossing that produces them. I suspect the butterfly is responsible for this. There are two of them, both are male:
The first fish:
The second fish:
Aren’t they beautiful?
Well, can we call them tosakin? Perhaps not. Not in the standard sense. But, can we create a different strain of tosakin? A softer and longer type of tail. Or is it a sin? Frankly, my mind runs wild imagining a possibility to put my signature on a new strain of tosakin!
But I do not have female fish with their characteristics.
What I will do for sure is to cross them with the female tosakin from the DBS line above:
And what will the result be? I can only imagine something good and beautiful! 😊
To refresh a little bit, I had bred Tosakin for many years alone with not much success. Then a friend of mine, mr Dibyo, offered his support in acquiring some good quality tosakin babies from the Izumi Line, Japan. We bought 40 in total. Sadly, they were hard to breed. Mostly the eggs did not hatch, or hatched in a weak condition and died immediately. There were rare occasion when the eggs hatched properly, but when it was time to cull, it became apparent that most of the offspring had defected dorsal fins. The defect could amount to more than 90%. It was a hopeless case.
But by that time, I had a male grey tosakin from Thailand which I acquired before. Since it was the only male I had, I crossed it with butterfly goldfish, and did backcrossing to the father for several generations. I tried to acquire decent tosakin by doing so, but it never happened to my satisfaction. Finally, I gave up the grey old fellow. He was very old and unable to swim. Mr Dibyo asked for the fish, gave him extraordinary care which I could not give, and he even succeeded to mate him with the Izumi line! And the result was fantastic! We called it the DBS line, under mr Dibyo’s name.
Mr Dibyo gave me lots of the F2 of that line, which he let me pick by myself. Mr Dibyo and I had different preferences concerning the tail. He would like to breed those with beautiful large middle tail, while I would like to focus on the fish with strong flips. I picked up those with flips always open even when swimming, with less regard on the beauty of the middle tail. Well, it was hard to get both features at that moment. But surely, it was our dream.
These are the four I kept for my parent fish: one male and three female.
The male:
The three female:
The mating is still hard for me. The fertile eggs are few. But anyway, I manage to have my own Tosakin babies! But I do not update on the babies for now. What I would like to update was my project to create better red color in the Tosakin. As you see, they are all orange in color.
As I mentioned before in another post, I had a very strong red color in a red and white male butterfly goldfish. I called him Beni. He died already. But I managed to cross him with tosakin. Of course I do not get tosakin tail-shape right away. The tail is between tosakin and butterfly. I saved only the fish with the best red color. And this guy is the champion:
He has split tail. Sometimes he shows small flips, but mostly he doesn’t. I am very eager to mate him with those female tosakins as soon as possible.
I have several different color in red spectrum in his siblings. But he is the most red. The picture below highlight how red he is compared to the tosakin. And this is the end of my diary today. Wish me success in creating a decent deep-red tosakin in the near future!
I try to take better pictures of my tosakin this morning. I realize that it is a bit hard to get a clear view of red-white tosakin in a white bowl. I wish I had a black one. Anyway, enjoy the pics.
This is the only productive female tosakin I have right now. She is an offspring of my Nagoya tosakin and my own tosakin line. She has a defect on the dorsal fin, namely, the dorsal fin does not cover the whole backbone.This is the male tosakin I paired with the red-white female above. He is also a young tosakin.These are the offspring of the two above, approximately three weeks old. They were many, but I culled out a lot since the flatness of the middle tail (as seen from side-view is not desirable. The angle of the tail is too upward. I also expect that some of the offspring will become all white since both parents are dominantly white. This is a feature I want to correct in the other pairing.This is the original tosakin I bought from Nagoya, Japan. The growth in the head is a sign of his old age (more than two years old). He is the uncle of the two red-white tosakin above.This is the offspring of the Nagoya tosakin and the redwhite female. So, this is a marriage between uncle and niece. The angle of the middle tail (as seen from side-view) looks better. And to me, they look more uniform. Promising. I think if I still have the chance, this is the pair I need to breed again.This is a male grey tosakin, as a sibling to the two red-white tosakin above. My own previous tosakin line (as one of the ancestor of the two red-white and this grey) was a grey thailand tosakin, so it is not surprising to get grey fishes in the descendants. I mated this grey with the red-white female also. i cannot produce the picture of the offspring since they are still very small (less than two weeks old).This is my male improved flysakin (a cross between tosakin and butterfly) that has been crossed back to tosakin. The flips are definitely tosakin. The thousand rays in the tail are also the trait of tosakin. But the middle tail is still split, and the whole tail looks soft (feasible only when they are swimming). I also pair this with the female red-white tosakin in the hope to create a tosakin with longer tail as my line’s uniqueness. These are the two fishes with intense red coloration that I would like to be the characteristic of my tosakin line also. My friend and me call these two the two Beni, since Beni is a koi terminology to refer to the deep red coloration (if I am not mistaken). I already have the offspring of these two Beni with my red-white female tosakin. It will still be a long process to create a true tosakin from this cross.These two are fertile female improved flysakin. The tail characteristics vary from soft to hard, from medium size to long. Yet, we can see a resemblance of tosakin in them. I mated these two with the original Nagoya.
If I was occupied with Oranda breeding in January, I was busy with Tosakin breeding in February.
Tosakin is very rare in Indonesia. Over the past decade, several people tried to breed it, some with no success, some with a temporary success but then discontinue for unknown reason. I was among those who passionately try to breed tosakin with no long-term success. Somehow the original line that I bought eventually being wiped out, and I must wait for another opportunity to acquire tosakin again. This happened several times in my breeding history.
About five years ago, I bought five tosakin from Thailand through a friend. Four of them could not make it. I was left with one grey tosakin. It is a male, and indeed, a beautiful one. My friend and me call him Grey. I had no choice but to breed him with Butterfly goldfish. The offspring was unique with many tail variation in-between tosakin and butterfly. We called the offspring the Flysakin (Butterfly – Tosakin). I did two or three generation backcrossing of flysakin to Grey, since this guy lived a long time. The backcrossing ended up with low quality tosakin that I did not proud of. None was close to the quality of Grey. I knew I took a great risk to the genetics health by doing many backcrossing to a single fish for several generation. Then the Grey got very old and a friend cared for him well until his death. I was left with two lines: flysakin (mostly grey) and low-grade tosakin as the descendant of Grey. At this point, the tosakin project became a hopeless case for me. I got used to failure.
Then a new opportunity came two years ago.
My friends and I had the opportunity to buy several baby tosakin from Nagoya, Japan. We were so excited to see the prospect of reviving tosakin in Indonesia. We divided the babies among us and grow them till adulthood. Too bad, it was not easy to breed them. Unlike other goldfish type, it was hard to differentiate between male and female tosakin by examining their anal. And none of them laid eggs in the first year. I prepared my courage to accept the worst: they might be sterile. Fortunately, in the second year, one laid eggs. The sec became obvious at this stage. I had several females with me, but only one laid eggs. I quickly paired her with the siblings. It was a happy moment to have so many tosakin eggs at last. Yet, another disappointment awaited. Almost all of the offspring had defect dorsal fins! I tried to breed her the second time, with the same result. There was something wrong with the genetics. Suspicion mingled with disappointment. But I know anger could not change the situation. I threw all of the offspring and decided to start over. At that moment, I launched three sub projects altogether. I mated the Nagoya with my low grade tosakin (descendant of Grey); I also mated the female Nagoya with my male flyaskin, and my female flysakin with male Nagoya. After executing these projects, the female Nagoya stopped laying eggs forever. What a close call!
Surprisingly, the cross between the Nagoya and my own tosakin produced decent tosakin. They were not extraordinary, but good enough. There were only seven of them, but they made me happy. Concerning the offspring of Nagoya x flysakin, some of them became very close to tosakin: some with long and soft tail (perhaps it still carries the genetics of butterfly) and some with medium and hard tail. Some more had split tails and large flips; they were very beautiful in their own way – I sold them because I did not use them to improve my tosakin project anymore.
This February, these offsprings began to lay eggs.
From the seven tosakin offspring I had, there were four females but only one laid eggs!. My alarm rang aloud. She was not perfect. She had a defect in the dorsal fin. The dorsal fin only covered 80% of the backbone. Yet she was the best shot I had. I could not postpone her breeding since I had no confidence if she would have another breeding season.
The productive female tosakin
So, I mated her with her siblings (two out of the three males from the seven set). I left one male out since its tail was ordinary. Then it occurred to me that pairing her up with his uncle (the male from the original Nagoya set) will be a good option, so I did this in the next occasion. A goldfish usually lays eggs every five days in my place. So, I can have many rounds of breeding in a season. I can pair a single fish with different males. The combinations above already took three rounds of breeding.
The three male tosakin offspring. I used only the red white and the grey.The male original Nagoya tosakin
I did not stop the breeding there. I continued to pair her with another males. Since I did not know how the result would turn out, I thought it was better to pair her with many different males in the hope of having good offspring from at least one of the combinations. In the fourth round of breeding, I mated her with the best of my improved flysakin, that is, the flysakin that had been crossed back to the original Nagoya tosakin line. At this point, I thought I already had sufficient combination of offspring to secure a good result.
But then, temptation creeped.
My goal is not just to breed tosakin, or to create the quality as close as to the original Nagoya. My goal is to create my own line of tosakin, hopefully with clearly defined uniqueness. What I had in mind is to create a tosakin with longer tail and bigger flips (who doesn’t want that?), and a strong red white color. The current productive female tosakin I had was already red and white in coloration. And the red color was not bad. It was already a dream came true. But, among my goldfish collection, I had two fishes with very intense blood red color in a red and white fish. Both were male. One of them was a butterfly, and one was a flysakin. They emerged randomly from my offspring without me remembering the genealogy. I was tempted to pair these two with the female tosakin. I knew the timing was not at its best, since my space were already occupied by so many oranda offspring and tosakin offspring. Could I afford two more projects? Or should I postpone this sub-project to the next breeding season, provided that the female could stay productive? It was risky. I remembered well about her mother stop laying eggs forever. Or could I delay this sub-project until the next generation? Well, would I still have my intense deep red goldfish at that time?
After pondering for a while, I decided to execute the project.
The butterfly with the deep intense deep red coloration and the female tosakin. Notice the slight difference in the intensity of the red color.
I must confess that I made another sub-project in this Tosakin category. Along with the female tosakin being productive, some of the females from my improved flysakin collection also came to age. I mated them with the original male Nagoya line. My reason was that my Nagoya was getting old. There was not much time for him to be productive. And his gene was so important to be paired with the improved flysakin, since this one cross would make my improved flysakin into a complete tosakin. I could not waste this opportunity.
So, I was very busy in breeding this January and February. My space was cramped and I need to exercise strict management to my little city farm. Pray to God that He will grant me success with these two projects. The question is: what will I do in March?
hermantogoldfish 