Did you really send this on Tue, 21 May 1996? I just recieved it.
Kinda wierd.
> This is in my opinion a common cause of skeletal deformity in aquarium
bred fishes. When you compound this with inadequate dietary Vitamins D
and C it can cause whole batches of fry to be deformed but does NOT
represent genetic deterioration in the stock and therefore they could be
used to breed from if desired as long as the ensuing fry are given
optimal conditions. If the fry from the second breeding are still
deformed then one may have to rethink.
A confounding factor in that second breeding may be that if the parents
are not in a healthy state because they were raised under poor habitat
conditions or nutritional conditions then they may not produce eggs or
sperm that are of the same quality even though genetically they would be
the same. For instance, they may not "give" as much nutrition to the
egg, or it may be lacking in certain things. This could occur
independantly of the parents present state of nutrition because often if
certain things are not able to develop normally in the early stages of
life then they may not develop fully later. Personally, I don't think it
is terribly likely, but we should be aware of its potential. Life was
never meant to be simple.....
I remember Adrian Dawson recounting a story to me regarding some
incisus. He split one batch of eggs with someone else (I forget who).
Anyway, one batch turned out much "better" than the other. In this
case it should be attributably to environmental conditions.
Unfortunately, aquarists never tend to experiment things properly or
thoroughly. Setting up some tight controls would be an easy and
interesting way to try to test some of these calcium lacking equals
deformity theories. :-)
Cheers
Peter Unmack