mpedersen

P.S. Sorry, the teacher in me has to jump in. I teach music, but I can totally see a module based on the Lightning Maroon breeding program being taught in Environmental Science and Marine Science high school classes. Crossing genetics with environmental components and applying to real life situations is a great classroom model and would really engage kids. Have you ever thought about creating something that teachers can use? I bet you could get funding to create something like that. It would be great publicity for your project, too.

My wife is a teacher Tell me more...

Once you take a wild lineage and begin to increase the frequency of a trait that is otherwise rare in a species

Do we stop to ask why it's rare in the species?

(I would argue) is technically engineering.

Is the occurrence of an "albino" fish and the preservation of that trait "engineering" an "albino"?

I believe it's actually selective breeding...only arguing the semantics because there is pre-existing terminology and the use of engineering to describe selective breeding will confuse people more towards the more widely held definitions of "genetic engineer" which are not selective breeding.

While there ARE those "designer" phenotypes in the wild, the offspring are engineered to exactly resemble the parents' desired phenotypic quality under controlled breeding settings, as truly random mating would not produce the same results.

Um....possibly not true? Afterall, IF the Lightning trait is partially dominant, then ANY PNG fish I mated it with would have produced more Lightning offspring - 50% in fact. If we do nothing, and randomly pair two fish to create a handful of second generation offspring, how many of those pairs are going to be Wild/Wild, Wild/Lightning, and Lightning/Lightning? Not too surprisingly, it would be 25%, 50%, and 25%. If one of four randomly paired pairs is a lightning X lightning pairing, and that's going to produce something totally different (in theory) in the F2 generation.

Now, of course, this is only dealing with the F1 generation being all siblings, but if the Lightning trait is partially dominant, then any of those F1 Lightning offspring can be mated to unrelated PNG White Stripe Maroons and still produce more Lightnings. And while we have only been shown TWO wild caught lightnings to date, we in fact do have it on rumor that there are more out there. And we only need to look to another partially dominant trait, Picasso, to know that in fact, that IS possible for a partially dominant trait to persist in the wild at some baseline low level. You could argue (as I do) that Picasso is a naturally occurring mutation within the Picasso species, not unlike seeing the occasional melanistic squirrel in your own neighborhood. This revelation has caused me to dramatically change my point of view on some aspects of designer breeding, because it screams "natural genetic diversity" in the same way that the polymorphic form of Amphiprion melanopus from the Coral Sea (where many lack headstripes) is valuable and natural. Or any of the african cichlids who persist in polymorphic states as well...we don't consider the breeding of these forms in captivity to be "egineering", although we do find examples where selective breeding can strip away the common presumed "default" wild type forms in captive settings, but so long as we understand the genetics and do not breed ourselves into a genetic dead end (basically meaning as long as we keep the default wild type around) we should be able to get back there if we needed to.

So what we've done, as breeders, is simply removed one of the reasons that we perhaps don't see MORE Lightnings in the wild - "natural selection" in terms of predation pressures among other things. My Lightning Maroon grew up in the wild, and arguably could have started spawning in the wild with a regularly striped fish and potentially produced 50% lightning offspring. It may well have been born from such parents. So why aren't there more lightnings out there? I would guess that it's probably for the same reason that we don't see too many naturally occurring albino animals and fish. Albinism is pretty well understood, to the point that I've heard numbers that every 200,000 or so fish produce will yield one albino. Clearly this common mutation occurs in nature, but we don't see it very often first because it is a recessive trait (I *suspect* Lightning is not recessive), but second because an all white fish sticks out like a sore thumb to a predator.

Ultimately, the only thing I'm doing in my breeding of the Lightning Maroon at this point IS yes, increasing the frequency of the trait by simply producing the fish. The only selection I've even done so far is to simply use the fish for breeding, and to pair it with a randomly selected, outwardly normal white stripe maroon, from the same geographic area (which is what would happen in nature). I certainly have not engineered anything, I've only not culled or "thinned the heard" of the fish with the phenotype (which we assume could be the explanation for why there aren't more out there in the wild...solid white clownfish might make an easier target).

Morning all! This thread popped up in my news feed for Lightning Maroon mentions Glad to see there's so much enthusiasm and debate. I am guessing no one on this thread was at my talk at MACNA, and I see there's a lot of "misinformation" posted about the Lightning Maroon etc. Much of that was cleared up already by other posters, which is great to see!

I'll gladly answer any questions folks have, but I wanted to actually address seomthing that ClarkiiCircus said - that is, calling "Wyoming Whites, Maine Blizzard, Onyx" all "engineered" fish. None of these are "engineered"...certainly not in the "genetic engineering" sense. From a breeding standpoint, one of the fish mentioned, the Onyx Perc, is actually a naturally occurring form of Percula (although some lines of Onyx Percs have been highly selectively bred and I contend could potentialy have ocellaris blood in them). That said, it isn't difficult to get a wild Onyx Pair...and anyone could start a new, fresh line of Onyx percula breeding with fish of known provenence (particularly fish from PNG or the Solomon Islands, where Onyx seems to be more prevalent).

Now, the "Maine Blizzard" mentioned? Well first, that's actually the same thing as a Platinum Perc; it's a name Soren Hansen gave his line of Platinum breeding (I've met Soren, a very nice guy, but on this front, I have big issues...breeders shouldn't be renaming things just to give the illusion of it being unique. One aspect of my MACNA talk was the standardization of names..most producers now recognize and are starting to follow a communally accepted naming covention where we add a possessive breeder brand/id in front of a name, such as "Rod's Onyx" or "SA Onyx" or "ORA Onyx".

Ok, tangent aside...Platinum perculas were not "engineered" in any way. They are actually a "Double-Dose" phenotype caused by two doses of the Picasso Gene. And here's the kicker - the Picasso, a fish I used to love to hate, is actually not a fish that originated in someone's tanks - the original ORA broodstock picasso was a wild caught fish. And get this - there have since been MANY other Picasso-type wild percula caught and sold into the trade. Now, ORA's original fish were Solomon Islands, and I *think* they've kept that SI provenence on THEIR breeding (can't say for other lines). Regardless, the breeding works like this. Mate Picasso to Wild Type Perc, get a 50/50 split. Mate PIcasso to Picasso, get 25% Platinum (the double doze homozygous form), 50% Picasso (the heterozygous form) and 25% normal percs (the homozygous wild type form). Mate two platinums together you get 100% platinums. While it's highly UNLIKELY, it is actually theoretically possible that two picassos could one day find themselves in the wild mated up, and start throwing out wild spawned Platinum percs. Granted, the odds of the pairing are beyond slim, and it's only further compounded by the fact that you now have a bright white baby clownfish in the ocean...easy pickings.

On the subject of Wyoming Whites, the true way they came about may never be known, but as told to me by Matt Carberry, they may actually represent a double-dose of a partially dominant trait; eg. equivalent to "platinum", but in the ocellaris species. The single does is purported to be the fancy with extra barring that they produce. I have no reason not to trust Matt on this matter. It's a fine line of distinction, but I consider the Wyoming White a "man-made" fish in so much as the original variation showed up in captive breeding, not in the wild. But honestly, it COULD have shown up in the wild in the single-dose form. Why not?

So, these revelations made, "designer breeding" actually need not present a *problem* in the face of conservation-minded breeding so long as a few things are in place (and this happens through community acceptance).

1. Hybrids are a separate issue, and hybrids CANNOT be undone. We should not pursue hybrid breeding at this point because we lack the appropriate framework for officially recording them and they can be very damaging to species conservation if they get into a breeding program as a misidentified fish (eg. a "Black Photon" Percularis being sold on as an Onyx Percula to a breeder)

2. We must keep our lines of provenance clean, particularly in clownfish because there IS a fair amount of geographic diversity, and at times, these forms have been elevated to independent species status (Amphiprion barberi for example). In breeding circles, behavioral and other characteristics have some people believing that the Black Ocellaris from Darwin is in fact a distinct species, and so to, the Goldstripe Maroon from Sumatra is fundamentally different from White Stripe Maroons (and has even had a distinct scientific name applied to it at one point in time, Premnas epigramma).

3. We must embrace genetic transparency and avoid "dead ends". Because we understand how something works genetically, we can actually "breed it out". Eg. you can bring a Picasso line of breeding back to the standard 3 bar form because we know how the genetics work. However, if all we have are double-dose Platinums, the only thing they produce is more platinums...they become a genetic dead end.

To these ends, the PNG Lightning Maroon has only been mated to other PNG White Stripe Maroons. The offspring counts suggest that the genetics that drive the stripe patterning for lightning is either a recessive or partially dominant trait (if it was dominant, 100% of the offspring would have been lightnings). If it's partially dominant, what that means is that we have yet to see what two doses of the "Lightning" trait will do. Impossible to say until we make it.

One of my huge requests from breeders everywhere who get the Lightning Maroons it to resist the temptation to cross them to the Gold Stripe Maroon to create "gold lightning maroons" because in reality, you are likely hybridizing the line and can really screw up other breeders who are trying to keep the PNG bloodline pure. I will strongly condemn folks for creating these hybrids. Furthermore, the cross of a Gold Stripe X White Stripe maroon is not terribly attractive...you won't have bright yellow lightning lines like you want..you'll get pale yellow at best, and only through generations of selective breeding could you push it back towards a more yellow form. NOT WORTH IT, particularly since ORA is now releasing their really unique "Goldflake" maroons which do have a genetic basis (but we don't know what just yet). Keep the lines distinct.

Anyways, that's enough rambling for me guys - I hope you find the insights interesting.