Young Lime Green Endlers
We were fortunate to have a few fry born shortly after we received our new Lime Green Endlers. The fry have grown quickly and we have had another batch fry born since then.
At first we thought that all of the fry except one had turned out to be female but in the last few days we found out we where wrong. There were actually several males produced in the first batch of fry.
We found that the Lime Green Endlers take quite a bit more time to start showing the colors needed to tell if their males or females than do Orchid Endlers. Looking for a gonopodium (male sex organ) is the best way to determine sex however both the coloration and the gonopodium seem to develop at a similar time.
The young male fry started showing colors at about 3 to 4 weeks old. These colors should really intensify as the Endlers get older. We can see so far that these are going to grow up to be some really beautiful fish.
There is quite a difference between young Orchid Endler’s and young Lime Green Endler’s.
Male Orchid Endlers develop small black dot near the tail fin at a relatively early age. Lime Green Endlers on the other hand are nearly full size when they first start showing color. This is because the colors on the Lime Green Endler tend to be lighter than Orchid Endlers until the Lime Green Endlers mature.
Anyway we are happy to report that our first batch of fry produced about 60% females and 40% males. This should be a good start and because the females were pre-hit the fry that were born in the first batch should have come from different males than what we acquired. This should help to give us good genetic diversity and we shouldn’t have to purchase more Lime Green Endlers for some time.
Now it’s just a matter of carefully controlling breeding to produce the finest Lime Green Endlers we can. We look forward to offering our first Lime Green Endlers in the spring of 2015.