Wild Livebearer

Xavier

Fish Crazy
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Jul 7, 2004
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maryland
Does anyone have a wild livebearer? where could i get one besides ebay and south america? :hyper: whenever i think about breeding using a wild swordtail, that analogy of a wolf mating with a malamute or husky comes to mind. :good:
 
I've kepet around 200 species od wild livebearers over the years and it depends on what u want to keep to say wheater the good or bad as some are just nasty little fish
 
I've kepet around 200 species od wild livebearers over the years and it depends on what u want to keep to say wheater the good or bad as some are just nasty little fish
xould you say they are they more aggressive or active than the domestic type?
 
Well if your thinking od swords there are around 12-15 species and another 7-10 wild platies.

Please explain some more of what your thinking and I'll give an honest answer of what i think.
 
Well if your thinking od swords there are around 12-15 species and another 7-10 wild platies.

Please explain some more of what your thinking and I'll give an honest answer of what i think.
swordtails. if i introduced a wild swordtail to my community tank could i assume that it would be more active and hardy than the domestic fish already in my tank. for lack of a better term let's say "superfish" :shifty: and if it did happen to mate with one of my females what would be the phenotype? maybe i should get a punnet square going
 
nobody knows? lets say any livebearer then. has ANYBODY in this forum introduced a wild livebearer to their domestic tank? :rolleyes: :thumbs:
 
Some of us do need sleep!!!!! I'm in the UK.


I hate the Idea of crossing fish....All you done need to do it, just get two line breed fish and from a quality breeder here you can see the history, not these shop fish where anything could have happened.

Once you get the random fry from the two different lines crossing you then select the colours or other features your looking for and then work with that.
You can do this with just one tank though you should be looking at dedicating at least 10 or even better 30 tanks to develop a new line you need to keep males and females apart and then back cross daughters with the dad and brother x sister to try to fix.

The they will cross no problems as they are the same species.

However if u want to see what could happen with wild xiphophorus crosses the research here as it's all been done for you already
www.xiphophorus.org/images.htm
 
It was a little unclear from your question if you actually wanted to introduce wild specimens of the same species (xiphophorus helleri) to your swordtails or if you wanted to cross them with other swordtail species.

The reason (or one reason) why most keepers of rare livebearers dislike the idea of crossing them with other fish is that a lot of rare livebearers are either extinct or threatened in the wild, so people who keep them in captivity see themselves as the guardians of that particular species. It's like a zoo that has got hold of a herd of Przewalski's horses, they're not going to waste that material breeding them with New Forest Ponies. The problem with fish is that once hybridisation has taken place those fish are likely to get into the trade, where they will be bought unsuspectingly by livebearer breeders who think they are buying the genuine wild species and so end up ruining their own breeding stock. This is what has happened to endlers, very hard to get hold of genuine un-hybridised endlers these days. And endlers are thought to be extinct in the wild. So if all the endlers in captivity end up as guppy hybrids, the species will be gone.

As for getting wild helleri specimens and crossing them, presumably that is ok, but I don't know how easy it is to get hold of wild helleri. The wild guppies I have seen are such beautiful fish, there is no way I would go ruining them by breeding them wild shop fish. The best course of action, anyway, would be as Helter suggests, to get in touch with some expert breeders.
 
i think Xavier just wants to know if he could put it in his community tank with out any problems, and if it would be hardyier or more active than domestic fish, and if he could breed these traits into domestic ones
 
i think Xavier just wants to know if he could put it in his community tank with out any problems, and if it would be hardyier or more active than domestic fish, and if he could breed these traits into domestic ones
:good:
 
i think Xavier just wants to know if he could put it in his community tank with out any problems, and if it would be hardyier or more active than domestic fish, and if he could breed these traits into domestic ones

Yes, and what I'm asking is, what exactly is "it". Is it a helleri swordtail or some other swordtail?
 

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