Hello,
I have now for longer not been active in this forum – which doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy looking for my paros 😉 . They are all well, I have quite a few offspring of my quindecim, few of my nagyi and rubrimontis (and many of my Betta hendra …). And tomorrow I will get pairs of P. allani and P. harveyi and a female for my single pahuensis male – which I am really looking forward to!
I would like to tell some news about my “unknown girls”.
I had only male offspring of my P. nagyi “Pekan Nenasi”, – and neither found someone interested in buying only males, nor found someone willing to sell the suitable females to me (there seems to be a surplus of males of this form of P. nagyi everywhere).
So I put one male into the tank with the two females of unknown origin and species. The male nagyi displayed at once – and the females responded. But I kept them together for more than a year and never saw a clutch or found any fry (which actually was nothing I hoped for – don’t get me wrong!).
In the meantime I sold my young males – all but one: I still have the male in the tank with the unknown females. Now I finally succeeded in getting a female P. nagyi from Pekan Nenas for this male – and so I emptied the tank yesterday and put the two females and the male nagyi each in separate tanks.
I didn’t expect any other life in the old tank – but, as I always do – I closely inspected the ground in shallow water before totally pouring it out.
You already know what I want to tell: There were 4 fry ………… approx. a few weeks old.
I succeeded in catching them – and now try to raise them in a separate tank.
It was really not my intention to produce hybrids of unkown origin – I didn’t really expect the fish to produce viable fry and if, I expected the fry to be eaten.
But now that they are there I will try to raise them and maybe – if there are males among them – it will be possible to get a hint of which species their mothers belong to. Maybe the males will show an intermediate colouration ……… it might be easier to tell aberrant characters from a nagyi male than from some other paro males (e.g., nagyi show no red colouration – so red colouration will be highly conspicuous).
I will report about the development of the fry – if you are interested.