Will it make a difference

[chrissyoscar]

If you breed a pair of Leopard snakeskins for example will the fry be a combination of snakeskins, leopards and also leopard snakeskins?
If so can you pair up for example a female Leopard and a male snakeskin and end up with the same combination of leopards, snakeskins and leopard snakeskins.
The reason I'm asking is I have two fineline snakeskins and two leopard snakeskins and would like to know if it's okay to let them pair up as they like. I think the fry will most likely be a combination of 3 anyway no matter how they paired unless the 2 snakeskins paired in which case I'll get no Leopard strain.
From what I think the only thing that might change would be the percentages of what you get depending on what paired up.
From this I mean if for example I had 2 leopard snakeskins paired then I'll probably get a larger amount of leopard snakeskin fry and a lesser amount of snakeskin and leopards. But if I had a snakeskin pair up with a Leopard snakeskin then I might end up with more snakeskins and less leopards and leopard snakeskins. I'm only guessing to this and would really appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks.. Oscar

[flukes]

Not really accurate but its about 40% A 40% B and 20% mixed AB
Maybe even a smaller amount on the mixed..

[sunshinediscus]

Yes it will make a huge difference which parent stock you use if the goal is to get lss. LSS bred together you will receive from 10% to 50% snakeskin discus as it is not a dominant gene. From those babies many will have red spots but ones that are at least as good as the parents will be a tiny percentage as the red spots are not dominent....maybe 5%. penang breeders expect maybe 1 in 100 to be considered high quality and that will be from high quality lss parents. All the genes you are trying to express are resessive so don't expect big numbers of quality lss.

[flukes]

Will he need to grow them up to about 7cm before he can tell which ones are the quality out of the batch?

[kevkoi]

Yes and no Scott. There are ways to tell from a young age, but it's going to be a very long discussion about "ethics" if I go into it.....

I almost always bang my head when I hear "LSS" from a local breeder.... They are such rare occurances that sometimes I wonder if they know what they are suppose to be? What I expect a LSS to be is very fully spotted... 10-15%maximum striations. Any significant amount of striations make it as good as a snakeskin in my books..... If it doesn't look as spotty as this picture, it really shouldn't be called LSS.

[chrissyoscar]

Thanks for all your help guys.
The LSS I've got are still young so it's hard to tell how they'll look.
The picture Kevkoi posted is a real beauty but I don't think mine will look like that.
If they do happen to breed in feature should the fry be refered to as spotted snakeskins or what?.
I'm only a novice and haven't bread before but it's something I'ld like to get into but only on a very small scale maybe 2-3 pairs that's it.
I do like the spotted look in discus but didn't realise how hard it was to achieve.

Oscar

[kevkoi]

The majority of fry should be refered to as "Snakeskin". Only a small (and I mean very small) percentage will fully spot up like the pic and deserve the title "Leopard spotted snakeskin".

We must make a distiction to a "mutation" name and that of a "selection" name.

Mutation names IMO are significant and true breeding. Selection names are well just that... names given to a percentage of exceptional fish in each spawn.

eg of Mutation names:
Pigeon
Ghost
Snakeskin
etc

eg Selection names
Leopard pigeon, Pearl pigeon etc
Gold top ghost, koi ghost
Scorpion snakeskin, Leopardspotted snakeskin etc etc

[flukes]

So Kev,
If you were to have 2 parents that both had that amount of spots would there still be only the select few of fry that would contain the same amounts of spots or would the chances be increased because both parents contain less stritations.??

[kevkoi]

Chances are increased but still only a percentage...
Even with Full spotted Leopard spotted snakeskins, there are grades.... the more dense the spotting, the better the quality, and the "rarer".

[flukes]

So i saw on your import list leopard spots whats the difference between these and the LSS.??? Sorry bout the questions just alot of confusion with this strain and it needs to be ironed out.

[kevkoi]

This is leopard spots.
Large spot and more sparsed. As young fish, the leopard spotted snakeskins have 14bars (any fish with 14bars are classified as a snakeskin.. this is a mutation. True breeding!), Leopard spots are regular 9 barred fish.

[flukes]

There not bad.. like the LSS better though.