Breeding · Strains ·Jan 26, 2021

Breeding and strains: Blood Parrot

Blood Parrot:

Why are blood parrot males mostly infertile, it’s not a breed I particularly breed but I believe it’s the same reason why kamfa males are rarely fertile and after some research I found this good explanation.
Hybrids are created when two different species mate and produce offspring. The most familiar hybrid is the mule, a cross between a horse and a donkey. Mules are usually sterile, but occasionally a female mule can produce a foal when mated with either a horse or donkey.
The sterility of hybrids often has to do with differences in chromosome arrangement or chromosome number between the parents and the resulting offspring. Donkeys have 62 chromosomes, mules have 63, and horses 64. All cats have 38 chromosomes except the margay and ocelot, which have 36, and most Felid hybrids are fertile. The same goes for dogs, coyotes and wolves, all of which have 78 chromosomes and can produce fertile hybrids. In all these cases, the animals are closely enough related to be placed in the same genus.

Blood Parrot Cichlids are thought to be a hybrid of a Midas Cichlid (Amphilophus citeinellus) and a Redhead Cichlid (Paraneetroplus synspilus).

In general, animal species in different genera are rarely able to hybridize.

In this case, the genetic distance between the two species is shown by the profound deformities of the offspring. Mouth and spinal deformities guarantee that these fish would not be able to compete in the wild.

Despite these deformities, blood parrots will pair off and spawn, and rarely can have live offspring. It is generally thought that the males are infertile, which is often the case in hybrid animals that have sex chromosomes, like our x and Y chromosomes. This was observed by J.B.S. Haldane In 1922 and is called Haldane’s Rule.

So hybrids are not necessarily sterile, but the differences in genes between the parent fish of blood parrot cichlids is responsible for the general sterility and deformities of these fish. In some places where the ranges of two closely-related animal species overlap, natural hybrids occur, and recently we have started to realize that speciation by hybridization may be an important mechanism in fish evolution.