Golden Ruber To Golden Platy
How can we get a pure gold platy of the Struve type from the golden rubers of Kammerzell? Wait for another sport? This is not necessary. Mate the golden, spotted ruber of the Kammerzell 'type to a gray platy. The gray platy has no large black spots and no red body color. If a golden ruber female is mated to a gray male as stated, normal-looking ruber males with spots and gray-looking females without spots appear. It looks as if the gold standard-bearers desert their colors. This is more apparent than real, for note what happens.
When the normal-looking gray daughters mate with their normal-looking ruber brothers, quite an array of variously colored platies appears. Each type of platy appears in a definite numerical ratio; among every three graylike platies there is one goldlike platy; and for every golden ruber there is one pure gold platy.
The color types of platies line up in this manner: FEMALES
3 ruber (gray and spotted)
1 golden ruber (spotted)
3 gray
1 pure gold
MALES
3 ruber (gray and spotted) 1 golden ruber (spotted)
212
3 gray
1 pure gold
By selecting the pure-gold females and males and mating them, it is easy to get a pure breeding line of gold platies. This part of the story is not a description of a theoretical setup; experiments similar to these have been performed time after time. No claim is made that Struve deliberately obtained his gold platies in the manner described. It is entirely possible that, by sheer chance, unbeknown to Struve, a series of matings such as outlined above led to the establishment of the pure-
* gold line.
Struve insists that his gold platies did not descend from ruber platies because his gold platies throw only gold-colored young. This is not good reasoning. His gold platies breed true because the gold platy is a recessive in inheritance. It hides nothing; it cannot produce anything else when mated to its own type.
Here, then, are the questions asked and their answers:
Q. Where did the first pure gold platy appear?
A. It appeared in the aquarium of Herr Otto Struve not later than 1920.
Q. What were the ancestors of the pure gold platy?
A. The old-fashioned ruber produced the Kammerzell golden ruber. The golden ruber, when mated to a gray platy, produced the pure gold platies in the second generation.
Q. How was the pure gold platy strain established? A. It was established by inbreeding the gold platies.
