# Will mollie lyretail genes pass to fry?



## Manthalynn (Aug 23, 2008)

I purchased an already gravid silver lyre tail Mollie and a week later she had fry. The fry were born on 11/8 and some of them are almost an inch long now. (I had 30+ and at least 25 survived to date. They're doing well on my 3x daily feeding, isolation, and more W/C)

None of the fry have the lyre tail appearance. I'm assuming there was a very high chance the male sire was not a lyre tail. Will these fry ever develop a lyre tail (similar to it taking a while for a male swordtail to develop its sword) or will they just never have a lyre tail? I don't know anything about the genetics of a lyre tail trait.

I'm more curious about anecdotal evidence from other lyre tail breeders but genetics info would be interesting (and tolerably understood...).


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## TheOldSalt (Jan 28, 2005)

Lyretail and veiltail in swords and mollies is a bit messy. You usually don't see these traits handed down directly from parent to progeny. Instead, there is a generational skipping sort of thing happening. Crossing two parents with the genes for these doesn't result in lyretailed fry, even though everything you thought you knew about genetics says that it should. Instead, you have to cross their plain-tailed children together to get the trait to reappear, at least most of the time. Fish genes are weird, eh?

In the case of these super longfins affecting the gonopodium to the extent where mating becomes impossible, things get really tricky and you have to cross a plainfinned heterozygous male to his longfinned sister to get a percentage of longfinned fry. It's not so bad with lyretailed mollies, but similar.

So, then, to get a bunch of lyretailed fry, cross these fry with each other and also cross some fry back to the mother.


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## Manthalynn (Aug 23, 2008)

That makes sense, I think. I took a Commercial Seed production course this fall and we touched a little bit on Hybridization, etc. I'll be taking a breeding class next quarter but I do know enough to guess that it's not a simple Mendelian single gene trail.

Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for in an answer. You rock, TOS.


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