Let us dig a little deeper to understand what goes behind the scene when breeding black fancy tigers.
According to the Taiwan shrimp book, there is a short paragraph mentioning about a reputable breeder who did a test between pure black line female x red tiger male and red tiger female x pure black line male. The results were astonishing as the output of the first cross PBL female x red tiger male has high success rate of getting the black fancy tiger.
Line breeding start after the F1 shrimplet begin to show sign of success and to get few better gene F1 to cross back to the parent. After many generations the gene strengthen to develop into the renowned black fancy tiger.
Are there variations?
Certainly, in the gene pool if the breeder do not cull their shrimps many variations may occur. One such variation is the white fancy tiger.
White fancy tiger?
It really is a washed out cross between the PBL and tiger whereby the lines are disappearing and also the hino or Sabre tooth PBL marking is gone.
As you can see from the above picture, the shrimplets from this female has a very high percentage of white fancy when bred with a similar male. Is this the outcome you are trying to achieve? There are breeders “marketing” this as mosura fancy tiger. Personally I think that depending on which variant or outcome you would like, you can breed it to your liking.
- 25% of the outcome will be black fancy
- 25% of the outcome will be white fancy
- 25% of the outcome will be mix (black and white fancy)
- 25% of the outcome will be mix (white and black fancy)
This is in a very simple form of understanding of breeding but of cause in reality there is slight variations to it.
Coming back to variations, it is becoming difficult to ignore the fact that breeders (not commercial) who are in the know will share with you the outcome when they sell you the shrimp. If they are unable or trying to make a fast one, walk away. There are many reputable breeders who are more than willing to share.
Additionally, there are “black fancy tiger” lookalike but has pinto gene in it. The reason for doing so is to reduce the time to get the “black fancy”. However, with this the outcome of it will look like a black fancy but isn’t.
This picture is taken from a breeder and it does look like a black fancy, but the price is many times lower than black fancy because the shrimplets are more stable unlike the original. How do you even differentiate a lookalike black fancy and the original?
There will come a time where the difference could be difficult to discern but for now a few tell tale sign is that a pbl and tiger cross would have :
- Hino or pbl pattern on the top
- Black and white colors
- Pinto will give off very white kind of shrimplet and is very stable
- GT will have a vertical bar on the head
- Degree of black differs between GT, Pinto and PBL/BFT
