Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Actually Johnnie, CG could have pure mossambiques. They also could be hybrids. It's tough to know by looking at them. I have caught references in the aquarium trade here to mossambiques in pink, orange, red, and albino. Mike Sipes has been breeding his lines for about 100 generations now.

I've placed a request at my favorite aquarium store for orange/red mossambiques plus some honorum. We'll see what they can find.

i moved out all the fish except the one with the eggs in his mouth because i know its a male.

Its a little hard trying to tell the difference of male/female as i am new to this type of fish.

I saw some red Tilapia they have a very deep red and all solid colour but the owner is the only one on the island with them and she wants to keep it that way.

But i got some info that she got them from Trinidad so i will be flying over next week to see if i can get some, these fish are nice looking way better than the ones i have i would love to breed the two as a hybrid.

i have no idea what type of fish it is that i have hybrid or not.

i think that to breed for the colour would take about 9 gen once you got one that is at lease a little red to start with.

CG, I don't think us mere humans can tell male from female in these fish. You have to let them figure it out. btw, Tilapia (now classified as oreochromis) are -female- mouthbrooders. Ie, the female retains the eggs in her mouth. The male defends territory.

Here are some nice clear pictures of some of the color variations of the Mozambiques. Both male and female are shown. The orange and red males seem to have more iridescence on each scale, but it's hard to be sure.

http://www.aquatext.com/images/fish%20etc/mossambic.htm

well you could be right Janet i am just going with what the man i bought them from said.

I got one fish in particular that attacks almost all the other fish even the ones that are twice his size so i think he is a male but i hate him he is to much trouble and will be soon on a plate.

As soon as i learn to "proses" these buggers

CG, the female holds her clutch. She will release them if put in her own tank. Once she releases, she will be hungry so go ahead and feed her.
Eventually the fry will stop returning to her mouth and you can net her back into the main tank. Before letting her go, turn her over and have a look at her oviduct, it will still be swollen and reddish or brown.

The girls have two openings, while the males only have one.

http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/vie ... &start=135

Any red Tilapia is a hybrid occuring either naturally or in captivity. The chances of natural selection of "red" are an anomally. Yours were bred in captivity CG...mixed and hybrid. However not genetically mixed for sex, since you have females. I would guess they were bred for meat since the body size is thicker than average.

This weekend I netted and ate ten of my males. Theaverage dressed out weight was . 4 lbs per fish.

Your terminology is a little confusing, Mike. There are three things potentially in play: natural selection, selective breeding, and hybridization. Let me try to differentiate them, speaking from my general experience, not from any experience with my breeding Tilapia specifically.

Natural selection gave us the wild version of the fish (or whatever lifeform we're working with). You won't get red tilapias out of nature for example, because being bright red and tasty is usually a disadvantage.

Selective breeding is man's attempt to create a superior lifeform that can breed true. Chickens have been bred to be meatier. Tilapia (or other ornamental fish) have been bred for different colors, for example. Racehorses are bred to be faster.

Hybridization is man's attempt to create a superior lifeform but that doesn't breed true. This is done by interbreeding two closely-related lifeforms. A mule is a sterile F1 hybrid between a horse and a donkey. Vegetables are another prime example. If you save your seeds from one year to the next, you will very quickly learn the difference between 'open pollinated' and 'hybrid'. Many seeds sold are hybrid F1. The seeds they produce do not accurately reproduce the parent plant in the next generation. The open pollinated ones will.

Mike Sipes has Red Mozambiques. My understanding of his breeding technique (and any other hybrid program for any other life form for that matter) is that each of the parent lines can be selectively bred for desireable traits without performing the hybridization. So a desireable Moz male can be bred to a desireable Moz female yielding desireable Moz fry. If the parents had a desireable coloration, hopefully the fry would express that same coloration. Sometimes particularly desireable females are bred back to their fathers to help lock in a trait. By continuing to breed Moz x Moz, selecting for desired traits, you get a desireable Moz breeder. At the same time as you are breeding for desireable Moz traits, you can also be breeding to produce desireable traits in a Hornorum line, for example. Only at the very end is the hybridization performed: Moz female x Hornorum male gets the 99% male tilapia. If we're working with Sipes's fish lines, he calls that a Pennyfish(TM).

Now assuming that you got a male and a female Pennyfish, they could probably be bred back together (or the F1 offspring of many hybridizations, although some are sterile). However, the F2 generation is not usually stable. Iow, recessive traits that were suppressed in the F1 hybrid start to express themselves in the F2 generation.

So....CG may be able to tell if he has hybrids when the fingerlings are large enough to evaluate for uniformity (color, growth rate, body shape). If they are breeding true, then his fish were probably only selectively bred, not hybridized.

The part that makes this really complicated, is that I understand that many of the 'pure' tilapia lines were accidentally hybridized at some point in the past since the different tilapia can be so hard to tell apart.

Sorry for the science lecture, but as you can tell, genetics is very interesting to me!!

Janet, with all due respect I was just trying to point out that there is no such thing as a "natural" Red Mozambique Tilapia. To even refer to them as Mozambique is not accurate since the reds originated in Taiwan and Florida. The original Mozambique is actually green/blue with red accents on the caudal and anal fins.

This is a direct quote from the Tilapia Journal....



It is near impossible to determine where his fish originated, however being in the Caribbean region I would CG's fish originated from Florida.

Selective breeding in captivity and Hybridization mean the same to me. In regard to Sipes Tilapia.... I don't buy it and I'll tell you why. First of all he is breeding for "naturally" occuring selective traits such as 99% male stock and a fish body size that produces more meat? He is not breeding for disease resistance, low DO tolerance, or other traits that make Tilapia a good tank culture fish, or AP fish for that matter and at least he hasn't addressed any of these issues in his pamphlets? I don't know, I can't get the guy to return my calls. Anyway, I say this is a dangerous game, and I have confirmed with at least one fish farmer who sustained a large mortality because of a weaker recessive population. I don't know for sure if they were Sipes' fish, but they were reds and they came from Palmetto Florida. Anyway I am not a genetic expert (I majored in Sociology) but I understand some of what you are saying.....

Cool, Mike! I didn't know the original reds were documented hybrids. Given that a natural Mozambique has red in it, I expected that it was bred for (without hybridization). Certainly that's what Mike Sipes says he was doing, although with enough inbreeding, you can certainly manage to fix some negative traits as well as positive. Like I said, I don't have experience breeding Tilapia (obviously), or with their specific lineages, so I'm happy to be wrong. I simply consider genetics to be a side-interest of mine. It sounds like with Tilapia, the whole breeding thing is really muddy ground since it sounds like a whole lot more than I knew is already hybridized.

So Mike, what would you suggest that I try to obtain as far as tilapia go? My hopes were to obtain (pure!) red Mozambiques females and hybridize with a (pure!) male honorum to get all males. If you think that the mozambique lines are all tainted (ie, have some hybridization already in them), then I won't get 99% male. So what should I try for? Something pretty and then learn to sex them?

I would get whatever is the cheapest and most accessible to you Janet and start there. You will likely run out of space after the second generation and find yourself dispatching of fry that you have no space for (and/or isolating the females which requires a third tank), or just buying tanks at flea markets as your fish breed. So don't spend gobs of money on your broodstock. My nile broodstock cost around $30 for 12 at the local fish store and I've got around 500 babies out of them since buying them as fingerlings, kept only about 300 due to space limitations. I could probably breed selectively for size and color, but I don't have the space and time for this really. As it is, it is enough work just to keep the sexes apart and manage the water quality in the fry and fingerling tanks. I would like a bit bigger fish in the end, but right now I don't have the time to breed for that. CG's reds are already bigger than mine and if you could get some you might be ahead of the game.

Another note: this weekend got pretty messy with gutting and carving fish. It was raining outside and I was forced to do it in the greenshop. My next system will include a cleaning/processing station complete with fresh running water and sterilizer. Fish heads Fish Heads rollie poliie fish heads

Alright, we will see what the aquarium can get. Does the breeding slow down if you lower the temperatures, and pick up when you warm them up?

yes... keep us posted what you end up with.

Mike, What would you think of the buttikoferi? Zebra cichlid. Aquarium info says they're plain mean, but they are tilapia.