In the beginning of this year, I mentioned the use of an oranda lineage I call my Basic Material. I crossed this line with my purple oranda line to produce Helen (the semi purple oranda). Let me refresh how they look like:
Besides crossing this line with my purple, blue, and brown oranda, I inbred them to keep the pure lineage to anticipate their usage one day. But I detect the saturation in their gene. Minor problems seem to occur in the offspring. Currently I only keep these three males:
In my first impression, they all lack the body stoutness of the parents. But the headgrowth feature is preserved. This headgrowth is important since Helen and her offspring still lacking in headgrowth.
So, several weeks ago I managed to cross Helen with those three musketeers. I am enthusiastic to see how the offspring will appear. There is a rule of thumb that the headgrowth (the front half of the body) tend to follow from the female parent while the rest of the body tend to follow from the male parent. Obviously, I go against this rule of thumb for this project. Anyway, it is just a rule of thumb for me. I never think it as a 100% truth. For the headgrowth, I hope to see a headgrowth larger than Helen’s. For the body, I am excited to find out. If we examine Helen’s body formation, it is different from the Basic Material already. But Helen’s body is also good in its own shape. Concerning the tail, both Helen and the Basic Material already have the rose-tail type. The offspring will inherit this trait, I believe. I just hope that they are free from the minor defects seen in the parents. The first of the three musketeers has excess layer in its upper lobes (left and right). The second one has slight unevenness in its lower lobe (not seen in the picture). The third one has the same weakness as Helen, which is one of the lower lobe folds inside when swimming. Perhaps I need to tackle this problem later if it persists.
Helen was born at the beginning of this year. She is not one year old yet. Interestingly, she has become the primary female in my breeding project this year.
Close to the end of this year, there are three projects left for Helen before she retires:
Deep red oranda project
Basic Material Preservation project
Purple Oranda project
In this essay, I will update the first project.
In my childhood, I had one occasion to keep a special red-white oranda. It was special because the red color was so intense. It was not orange nor deep orange. It was truly red. I have never seen such an oranda again ever since. If we examine Helen, she is an orange and white fish. In the world of goldfish, we call it red and white, since we believe the orange can be improved by giving her certain ingredients. But even with a good color enhancer diet, it is hard to improve Helen’s color in my city where the general climate is warm (tend to be hot). It is easier to achieve deep red coloration in the colder water. Anyway, I do not use color enhancer often. I use it mostly during the color mutation stages.
I felt lucky when one of my red-white butterfly goldfish offspring developed an intense red color. It was an anomaly in the batch. There was only one individual. I named him Beni. The red color is so striking even without color enhancer diet. I have used Beni to improve the color of my butterfly goldfish (it is under way). I have also mated Beni with my semi-tosakin goldfish with the long term purpose of creating tosakin with deep red coloration. And now, I am thinking of reviving my childhood special oranda!
So, I mated Beni with Helen at the end of last month.
Their feature differences are in the eyes, headgrowth, and tail shape. Adding color to the list, the project becomes a four-level difficulties. Well, the body shape is certainly different, but I think it will not contribute much to the difficulty. So, with this difficulty level, I do not think my special oranda will occur directly in the F1.
I predict I will get some intense red color offspring in F1, but not in the shape of a decent oranda. The protruding eyes are usually recessive to the normal eyes, so I expect normal eyes in the F1. I will also expect minimal or no headgrowth. From my experience, such a cross between a goldfish with headgrow and without headgrowth will result in no headgrowth in the initial stage. But as the fish gets older, it will develop small headgrowth. Let’s assume that I will get no headgrowth in the F1. The tail might not be as erect as I desire. The body shape might be so so. I will just pick the intense color ones to be the next parent fish.
At this stage I have two choices:
I can cross F1 x F1
I can cross F1 with another oranda
The first choice will strengthen the desired red color, but will let the improvement of oranda body conformation to chance. In fact, I might have some telescope eyes as the result of the recessive gene meeting. The headgrowth and tail might come variably, but might not even close to the desired standard. If this course is taken, the next step is to pick the F2 (already with deep red color) that resembles oranda as close as possible. From there, I can cross the F2 with another oranda.
The second choice will let me improve the body conformation to oranda standard. But, I do not know about the coloration. At this point, I need to admit that I do not know how the deep red color and the orange color will interact when they are mated. I know about yellow x orange, or blue x orange. They follow simple Mendellian rule. I also know about black x orange, which resulted in a spectrum between black and orange (namely: black, semi-black, grey, black-gold, and orange). But different crossing between black and orange can result in different color, though still within that spectrum. But I do not know what will I get if I cross deep red and orange. My guess is that it might behave similar to the black x orange. There might be a spectrum of color in the result (namely, orange, reddish orange, and intense red). But my F1 is not purely deep red since it is a cross between red and orange already. Will that mean my chance of getting intense red will be very slight in the F2 or even none? This course might give me a better oranda conformation but jeopardizing the intense red color.
Which course should I take?
Well, I still have half a year to come up with an answer. Plenty of time. But if you have any insight for me, please write a comment. I will be thankful.
One of my side project is to create a celestial eye butterfly goldfish. The inspiration comes from an old internet picture displaying a twelve-red goldfish with short body-type, beautiful butterfly tail, and celestial eyes!
I have been breeding Butterfly Goldfish and Celestial Eyes for some years. Both were rare in my country at that time. When a certain seller imported the fishes, I quickly acquired them in order to preserve the gene in Indonesia. There are two types of popular Celestial Eyes nowadays. The first one is the old style that has slim long body and long tail. The second one has thicker long body, short tail, with pompom in its nostril. Mine is the second type.
At that time, I was thinking that keeping these two goldfish varieties was a tedious job for me. I had lots of other projects as my priority. But, I did not want to lose these unique gene. So, I thought that combining these two varieties was a good idea. I started this project in the beginning of this year, in the midst of my Oranda Projects.
I was very certain that I would get some Celestial Eyes right in the F1. This confidence came from the fact that Celestial and Telescope Eyes are related (Butterfly has telescope eyes). If we watch the development of Celestial Eyes, the eyes start from protruding to the right and left, which is the same development as in Telescope Eyes. But if telescope eyes development stops right there, the development of celestial eyes continue. After protruding to the sides, the eyes will rotate to the front, and then rotate again upwards. So, their first eye-development stage is the same, which makes me think they are related. And this proves to be true in the result.
The body types of the two variants differ. Butterfly has short rounded body form, while Celestial has an elongated body shape. My goal is the butterfly body form. But it seems that the elongated gene is dominant. All the offspring has elongated body shape. I hope there will be some shorter and rounder body in the F2.
The tail shapes of the two are different. Butterfly has beautiful large and long tail, while my celestial has short tail. The result varies between short and medium tail in F1, but no butterfly tail shape. I hope there will be some butterfly tail in the F2. If this happens, then my project will be completed. But I prepare myself for disappointment which might take longer time to realize my goal.
Now the F1 has come of age and start to lay eggs.
I had two males with decent enough Celestial Eyes type. The females are all Telescope eyes. The eggs will hatch tomorrow, and I am excited to see the result in the next several months.
These are the two males:
I will update the results when the time comes. Enjoy.
One unsuccessful attempt in the beginning of this year was the Brown Oranda project. Gladly I have the opportunity to resume the endeavor right now. I still keep few offspring from my original brown oranda line as a back up. One of these have matured into a charming male ready to mate.
This male is not perfect. There is a defect in its tail where the left and right upper lobes do not align well. The left tail is higher than the right one. The body is a bit slim, and one of the aim in this improvement project is to create a more stout body. The headgrowth is still minimalist. Yet he is very photogenic. I cannot help to post his many beautiful pose for us to enjoy.
What I learn about the brown color is that there is a spectrum in the color. There is the dull brown color which is almost undifferentiable from the wild color. Well, most of the brown color look grey when they are in the pale state, such as after being medicated. But they will turn darker into brown color. The one that can only achieve dull color closer to the wild color is not a good fish. There is also the dark brown color, which is nice. But my favorite is the brown color that resembles tea color such as this male. For me, it is the best.
Let us enjoy this guy:
This pair this male with Helen. This has taken place several weeks ago, and now the offspring is already two centimeter in size. In my prediction, some of the offspring will have stout body like Helen the mother. Most will have beautiful tail since both parents have good tail though in a different style. But the headgrowth will still be minimalist since both parents are like that.
How about the color? Yes, Helen is a red fish in its phenotype. But she carries 50% of purple color genetics. So, Helen is a semi-purple goldfish. We need to remember that purple is a color that emerges from the crossing between brown and blue. So, when the purple genetics meets the brown genetics, I will directly get some brown in the offspring.
When the eggs hatched, they can be distinguished into two color: the dark one and the light one. I am sorry I do not take their picture. The dark one is just like the usual fry which will turn into wild / red color. The light one will turn into brown or purple – they can be distinguished at such an early state but this is very hard to do. So, I just separate the light ones from the dark ones at day 1 after they can swim. Why do I need to separate them so early? Because the light one is weaker. Most of them cannot compete with the dark one for food, resulting in malnutrition and stunted growth. Separating them as early as possible will let the light colored fry to develop better. I cull out the darker ones at this stage.
Will I have a good tea-colored offspring? This is hard to predict. In my experience, such a crossing sometimes creates a weak brown color where the fish looses the melanin totally. The fish turns into a complete orange color. If this happens, it will be a set back to the project. Some turns into brown color with the spectrum ranging from the pale / dull ones, the tea-colored ones, and the deep brown ones. There is a special case where the fish turns into a brown and orange fish (two colors) or a complete orange color but then the melanin grows. So, instead of loosing the brown color, the fish regains it and stay in a pleasing two tones color of brown and orange. This is a desirable result.
The pictures below are from my old files (2018). Pardon the bad photography. These pictures illustrate the transformation of the special case where the brown color grew.
One feature that I want to include in my line of Oranda is the Goosehead type of headgrowth. In the book “Goldfish Appreciation” (By Steven Tong & Hermanto), we mention the principle of Main Identity. And the main identity of an Oranda is its headgrowth. Many breeders may not be aware of this principle such that when they try to improve their lines of Oranda (mostly by cross breed), they forsake the headgrowth. Well, one example of such a breeder is myself. Helen, as my main female Oranda this season, is a result of such attempt. In the effort to produce better body form and tail shape, the headgrowth becomes smaller in size.
Not a bad fish, right?
But the headgrowth is not the highlight of the fish. When we see Helen from sideview:
the first thing that catches our attention might be the stout body, or the beautiful tail, but not the headgrowth. In the principle of Main Identity, Steven and I insist that first impression we get from an Oranda should be the beauty of its headgrowth. Helen does not have this highlight.
Let us compare Helen with this Oranda:
This fish is also mine. At the first glance, people will almost always notice its headgrowth. So, the fish satisfies the requirement of the Main Identity Principle. Too bad, the body and tail are not as good as those of Helen. (This fish is not with me anymore by the time I write this blog)
I must mention that the book also talks about the principle of Overall Beauty. By this we mean that after the Main Identity get the right attention, the body and tail should also be good to make overall fish beautiful. Some breeder fall into the other spectrum of the trap by putting all the effort to make eye-catching headgrowth but by neglecting the body form and tail shape. This will not do.
So, my aim is to create a balance between the principle of Main Identity and Overall Beauty. I want to improve the headgrowth of Helen’s offspring. How? By crossing Helen with other Oranda that has good headgrowth. Luckily, I have two males for this purpose.
But before that, let me explain why I choose the goosehead type when obviously there are many other headgrowth type equally beautiful. First, it is purely personal preference. I just fall in love with the goosehead type. Second, I want to differentiate my line from the existing ones in the market.
Now, these are the two goosehead I have. First male:
Second male:
These two males are the halfway result to improve the goosehead tricolor Oranda body and tail forms. Forgive my bad memory, I think they are the cross between the tricolor Oranda with my purple Oranda. That is why their body and tail are not very weak, though not as beautiful as those of Helen. Unfortunately, I have no compatible female for them. I end up with only these two males. That is why my best choice is to cross them with Helen.
The offspring has been three days old. A small portion of them is light in color, which means they are either purple or brown Oranda. The rest are dark color, which can become wild color or red like Helen. If some becomes tricolor, it will be a big bonus for me. But I do not know about this.
I am really enchanted by Cow Ranchu. Producing one good quality after several years of effort cannot be considered as a success. I might need new ammunitions. Gladly, a seller friend (Kwan Goldfish, Jakarta) imported several beautiful Cow Ranchu several months ago. I observed that they have different characters from mine. I quickly bought some of them. I selected the fishes with least red pigmentation since I could not find any without any red color. I also chose the ones with minimal black patches. Well, this is a personal preference. I believe the black color will grow.
This is the suspected male.
The next one below is a female. She does not lay eggs yet.
And the last one is surprisingly productive. She lays eggs from the start. The eggs are not many, and some are infertile. I guess this is the first time for her to lay eggs. She is a bit too young. I expect better result from her in the coming weeks. I mated her with my current male Cow Ranchu (from Diary #15) since the male sibling does not produce enough sperm yet. Probably he is still very young.
My Cow Ranchu babies that I mentioned in the Diary #10 this May have matured and are ready to spawn. This activity takes away a lot of time and space from my Oranda projects for the last several months.
One surprising update is the transformation of one particular baby. As I looks back to his pictures in May, I marvel at his current transformation. These are the before and after pictures:
The black pigment has grown significantly in just several months. This transformation happened also in his father. (https://hermantogoldfish.com/2020/10/31/the-transformation-of-my-cow-ranchu-2019-2020/) I can confidently conclude right now that Cow Ranchu has the ability to grow their black color. This conclusion comes with a note. In my observation, when the young fish has black pigment, be it a black dot or a large black pattern, which exists on the surface of the skin, then the black pigment can grow. But if the fish is totally white without any melanin present in any layer of its skin (some call it Casper) as in Casper the ghost), or if the black pigment exists only under the skin (some call it blue-based / bluish color), my conclusion does not hold. I am not sure yet if the outer black pigments can emerge in such fish.
This cow is a male. There was another male I mentioned in the Diary #10. But since the tail was too widespread, I discard him as a male parent.
The female is the only grey one. She was the offspring of a different version of Cow Ranchu (which I have not documented well – sorry for that). She does not change her color. These are the before and after pics:
The tail is a bit widespread, but I still use her for lack of choice.
What is interesting in both fishes is the small tail size. The current market names it the Tiny Tail. And this feature carries forward to the next generation
I mated the Cow with the Grey several times. As happened many times before, the result is far from satisfying. All of them are calico (no cow color), and mostly come with all sorts of defects. Yet there is an improvement this time. From the first batch, I keep five of them. This is better than before where I discarded all of the offspring. From these five, only the first two I consider as my prize. The rest are just backups. Here they are:
Though the back curves are not very smooth, the shape of the curve is good. There might be some improvement later on, I hope. And they already have black pigments on the outer skin. I hope to see the black pigment grow. I consider calicos with such quality (the growing black pigment) as an interesting quality. These are the pics from top view:
I will see how the fishes develop and decide later onwhat to make out of them. Perhaps they can be my line of Calico Ranchu. Perhaps I can use them in my Cow Ranchu Projects. I have not documented the younger batches, since they are too small to take picture. But the second and third batches are all calicos.
I would like to conclude this Diary with the pictures of the three backups. Have a good day.
This is a tribute to my Dancing Queen. Several years ago I tried to create a side-view version of Tosakin. I nicknamed the fish as the Dancing Queen to appreciate the beautiful playfulness of the tail. I successfully created an erect tail with split, and the tosakin flips could be enjoyed from side-viewing.
The tail was really a beauty. Yet, the body was weak and plain. The color was just orange or grey. I tried to improve the body and the coloration with this result:
The body was improved. The orange and white color was certainly an improvement. The tail seemed to be slightly smaller, yet still a decent one. However, it seemed that the market did not respond well. Besides that, I have a lot of other projects on goldfish. So, I struggled hard to let the project go. This fish was the last (and best) Dancing Queen I had, and I let a friend adopted her without leaving any offspring.
Well, perhaps it is natural for a breeder to have a deep attachment to his creation. I was ready to let go. But I still mated the uncle of the last Dancing Queen (a grey one, and sorry I did not take any picture of it) with an Oranda. I did not even remember which Oranda I used. This was not a planned project. And I did not expect anything. Such a cross might yield nothing of any worth. So, this cross was an uncalculated project, ready to be discarded at any moment.
Surprisingly, something good came out of this project! I did not expect to be able to get a decent oranda with dancing queen tail from the first attempt of the crossing. It was almost impossible, I thought. But the fact speaks otherwise. I ends up with two decent oranda with very beautiful Dancing Queen tail style! Yes, the color was only grey, but I think they are lovely.
This one is the first fish:
This is how the tail looks like when swimming (when the tail collapsed)
And this is the second fish:
This is the tail when swimming
There are oranda with similar type of tail in the market produced by Thailand breeders. They named the tail as Orchid tail. I do not know about the history of it, but I might walk in the same path as them.
This is the topview appearance of the fishes:
The appearance of these two disrupted my current oranda project. I already had my Basic Material Oranda. But the tail was Rosetail type (wrinkle tail). Compared to this Dancing Queen tail style, I think I face a great temptation to incorporate this type of tail into my Oranda. There is no way I ignore such a beauty.
So, last week I mated Helen the Oranda with these two 😊
Remember Helen?
This is Helen
Sometimes Helen shows a bit of tail flips similar to the Dancing Queen, though not always. I think this is a good sign. The mating between these fishes might yield an outstanding result.
This is Helen doing her flips
I am enthusiastic to see the results 😊 Perhaps my Dancing Queen will evolve into Oranda with Dancing Queen tail shape.
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):
Before
After
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.
Before
After
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:
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 😊
I have crossed metallic scales goldfish with transparent one many times. The offspring consists of both types of scales. But I never counted how many for each of them. Since my concentration was mainly to keep the transparent ones, I just cull out the metallic ones without counting. Now I am curious to know the statistics.
I happen to cross my yellow transparent scale oranda (female – left pic) with my yellow metallic scale oranda (male – right pic):
I quickly realize that I made two mistakes which might affect the accuracy of the result. But it already happened, anyway.
First, the counting will be more accurate if I kept all the offspring from the beginning. I did not do it since I had no intention to count at that time. So, I have done the first culling, which is sorting out one-week-old hatchlings with tail defects (seen from above) and small sizes. Assumptions can be made, whether the number of both types being culled out are the same or the percentage of both types being culled out are the same (as the result I will report shortly), but both assumptions are risky. This is one of the weakness.
Second, I forgot whether the transparent scale fish carries the metallic genetics (a cross between transparent and metallic scale parentage) or it is pure transparent already (a mating between transparent and transparent). I fear this might influence how the result will be interpreted.
Admitting these weaknesses, I counted the offspring when they are about three weeks old. Here are some samples of them (not the total number):
Transparent scales: 73 (53.3%)
Metallic scales: 64 (46.7%)
Looking at these numbers, the transparent scales are slightly more than the metallic scales. But I think the difference is not significant, considering the first mistake. I think it is safe to conclude as a rough breeding guideline that the cross between transparent and metallic scales will yield both types of scales with 50:50 ratio.
hermantogoldfish 