Problem Genes, should we care?

Welcome back to the irregularly scheduled rants, this is a topic that gets me so angry, and I can see the issues that are facing the industry. But we as keepers can make choices, and even if that isn’t the same choice that others make it will still matter to the fish you keep. 

Check out this episode!

Welcome back to the Tropical Fishkeeping UK podcast. I’m Ruth and I said on the last episode that you may or may not have heard because as I’m recording this, it hasn’t actually been pushed out to any platforms except the website. So if it’s ever missing guys, I publish on Wednesdays and I’m also trying to add in Fridays as well. If you haven’t seen anything, check the website, check the page. I post everything on both of those normally.

So I said that this has been winding me up and it really, really has. And I’m trying to remain calm and not just start yelling. Doesn’t do any good. REPTA is the reptile trade association. They brought out something called a deleterious genes policy. And I’m just going to read a bit from it. And it says the growth of reptile breeding in the UK has brought many benefits. A wider variety of species are now being bred in captivity than ever before, including critically endangered species. A key feature of modern herpetoculture is the development of animals with unique appearances, known as morphs. These are often the result of selective breeding and can produce color, pattern, or structural differences that many keepers find attractive. In most cases, such morphs pose no additional husbandry challenges and can leave full, healthy lives.

However, some morphs are associated with serious health issues and compromised welfare. Why problematic morphs are a concern. Some genetic derived traits, known as deleterious genes, are linked to structural, neurological, metabolic, or physiological abnormalities. These issues can include poor coordination or the inability to right themselves. Neurological symptoms such as head wobble, including inner ear issues and vertigo. Metabolic issues where digestion and consumption of muscle mass is evidenced seriously. Curtailing longevity. Dermatological issues such as diurnal, scaleless species that are unable to filter UVB radiation and thermoregulate correctly. Cancerous issues where a gene is known to promote both benign and malignant tumor clusters on the animal, inevitably curtailing lifespan. Curtailed lifespan issues were. A gene being present almost guarantees that the animal will never enjoy the established average lifespan for the species. Fatal embryonic issues are not considered a moot point regarding deleterious gene discussion. Animals that either die mid-development or immediately upon hatching or birth because of an inherited trait.

Then it goes on to say, let’s talk about the genetics and it says REPTAs position. REPTA believes knowingly producing animals with harmful genetic traits is not consistent with responsible or ethical reptile keeping. Self-regulation is essential if the sector is to maintain public trust and avoid external legislative restrictions. Raptor therefore calls on its members not to breed, sell, or purchase any morphs or combinations known to cause significant welfare issues. This applies to reptiles sold in specialist pet centres and through commercial breeding. They then go on to list a whole load of morphs that are known problems. And if you’re in the reptile community, I can almost hear you going. So we’re talking about spider morphs. Yes, that is one of the main morphs they’re looking at. So spider royal pythons, super champagne pythons. There’s a whole list of them there. There is super jungle boas, uh, skull faced western and plains hog noses, super cappuccino crested geckos. The list goes on. I’m not going to read them all, but why has this made me angry? That is a brilliant response. In fact, I’m one of the people who think there should be more genes added to that. And I totally see reptiles position in that. They can’t. They can’t ban everything straight off. There’s got to be a reason discussion as to what’s on the list of being negative and what’s on the list as being safe.

What really annoys me really, really winds me up is that in Fishkeeping we aren’t even a tenth of the way there yet. There is huge support in reptile keeping for this list. Nobody’s pretending that there isn’t. There are some people coming out saying it’s wrong, some people saying that they’ll do whatever they like and they are perfectly within their rights to. These are not illegal, it is just the trade associations coming out saying to their members, please don’t, please don’t sell these. And I think as a hobby and I’m going to say, yeah, sorry, guys, you’re sort of included in this statement as well. I think as a hobby as a whole, we should be coming out and we should be defining the deleterious genes that are within fish, and we should be saying we shouldn’t be selling them in the UK. I’m not saying we should be legislating. I’m not saying we should be legislating at this point, because the slippery slope argument is real. Once we start saying one thing’s things banned. It’s quite easy to get other things added on and banned that. But aside from OATA to saying something, it’s not a OATAs job to police what we keep in our tanks. They are a trade association. We are the people buying these animals and shops. I’ll give a call out to shops. Shops? You shouldn’t be selling them. Sorry. You shouldn’t.

If there is a welfare concern about particular fish, they shouldn’t be kept in this country. They shouldn’t be kept. But let’s start with they shouldn’t be kept in this country. So what am I talking about? I’m actually going to start with bettas. You all thought I was going to start with parrotfish, didn’t you? I’m going to start with bettas. I think every fish should be able to swim and swim properly. I think they should be able to breathe easily, and I think there shouldn’t be any added risks to them. And several scale color combinations in bettas. Some of those really long friends that we’re going for now, the the excess vintage means that they are actually struggling to get to the surface. And the problem with this is bettas need to get to the surface to breathe. Studies have shown when their labyrinth organ is damaged or removed, then they die. They can’t get enough air in so they do need to be able to breathe. That means they need to be able to swim. So many times you see people recommending hammocks near the surface for bettas, and I agree with hammocks near the surface. But hasn’t it got to a sad state of affairs when the fish needs to be supported closer to its oxygen source, because the fins are so big that it can’t swim properly, and we don’t do them any favors because we tend to put them in smaller tanks so they don’t have the chance to build up the muscle mass that’s required to deal with these huge fins. Should do I say all bettas should be taken out? No. There’s plenty of ones that can swim fine. I’ve kept bettas in tanks with quite heavy flow. They were fine but I deliberately chose ones with shorter finnage. I chose ones that had more balanced finnage. We also have some that have various combinations that increase the risk of tumors, and that’s one that’s actually mentioned for reptiles. Should we be buying and encouraging the breed, therefore encouraging the breeding of an animal known to have tumors? I think no. I think this is something that needs to be taken out of the hobby. We have several species in the hobby, and I am talking now about hybrids, and I’m specifically going to be looking at flowerhorns and parrots. Parrots. Their jaws are misshapen and they’re deliberately bred to be misshapen. They also probably have the short bodied gene. The reason I say probably is on other species, although you are seeing it more in mollies. You get the skull and the short, but it tends to be rounder. The back. If you look at many goldfish species, you’re looking at more of the other short bodied gene. The whole spine and the skull seem to round off. Parrots the skull, then sort of terminates quite sharply. And then you get that rounded back. I don’t think we should have anything that has deliberate deformities that cause welfare issues. And I genuinely think the deformation of the parrot jaw through deliberate production. I’m not even going to say breeding, deliberate production means that they can’t use the pharyngeal jaws, but they are still big bruiser cichlids with all the behavior aspects of big bruiser cichlids. And yet we are going out and picking them in the same way. People are going out and picking pugs because their faces look cute and like a baby. We are picking them because they smile. Well, I’m really hoping that we’re aware that smiling isn’t a facial feature in fish. It’s not something they do. It’s something we recognize because we do it. What’s my problem with Flowerhorns? Because actually some flowerhorns can survive in the wild. I once saw a short bodied flowerhorn floating upside down at a show. This was such a good quality fish that they’d taken it to a show. And every so often someone would flip the half the lid of the tank up and prop him back up against his bit of wood. And there was all the very much. Oh, yes, he’s he. He goes upside down. Um, because his. I’m not going to use the word because I think if I use the word, I’m probably going to get stung by various social media platforms for it. But his head growth, um, is such a fine example that we wanted to bring him along. It doesn’t matter how pretty the protuberance is, the fish couldn’t remain upright because I think the the thing was about half fifty percent of his size. So, you know, there was like two thirds body, one third protuberance. That’s a good word for dry. Not to say the one that’ll get me demonetized if I push this to most platforms. He was upside down, like I say, for a good proportion of the show. That is not good welfare practices. I don’t care how big you want to make it look. No, we shouldn’t be doing this show. Short bodied Molly’s balloon rams. I can name all these fish and one things. We know. The organs aren’t in the right positions. There’s always, always a good start. Always a great thing when you’re deciding on your animal. What do I want in an animal? I want an animal with a deformed spine and all its organs in the wrong place. Yay! Especially if it’s one of those organs is the swim bladder and the intestines. And a lot of fish. Some fish have proto stomachs, some probably don’t have what we define as a stomach. Some do have stomachs. Like I always say, no such thing as a fish, but they need those intestines to work. They need the swim bladder to have a certain amount of space to work. And what tends to happen? We see it time and time again that these fish, at the slightest problem in their lives, tend to go belly up, tend to suffer more, and tend to die younger. And I don’t think they live full and active lives like a more natural shaped version would. Someone’s going to call me out on goldfish. We’ve had goldfish for thousands of years. We have. We’ve had bull baiting for thousands of years. I don’t want to bring that back. Particularly cruel is cruel and I think many goldfish have gone far, too far. I used to keep orandas. I won’t keep them anymore, partly because my knowledge is expanded, partly because I think they’re getting more extreme. We see problems in Orandas. We see problems in the probably the most, the least deformed versions of goldfish. We still see issues with digestion. We see issues with floating. We see all these problems. Yes, some live long and healthy lives. The bulk don’t. I’m going to add to this, and I’m going to even go down to things where I think some people will say I’m going too far, but I think it’s worthwhile mentioning them. We know that the albinos of some species will try and hide away from the light more, and I do genuinely believe you need to keep these in lower light tanks, or maybe heavily planted so as not as much light getting down to the bottom. Do I say that these shouldn’t be in the hobby? Probably not. I mean, albino corys are such a staple of the hobby. Feels almost like sacrilege to start to say they shouldn’t be in there. I don’t think I know anybody who’s got an albino version of the fish in question who wouldn’t be happy with an another colour, and that is something I will say. I’ve had albino corys before. This is partly why I’m mentioning it, and I would have perfectly happily had the bronze. I had a pair of albino cribb’s ones because I had a theory about mate choice. And I wanted to say. And the easiest way to say it was with albinos, I don’t think their behavior was as natural as I’d have liked to have seen. Their breeding behavior was quite drastic, but males would choose the albino female over the wild type colored female. She didn’t produce as many fry, but that is a sample size of one, so don’t take that as being gospel though. What I’m trying to say here and what has really got me annoyed. I think that’s the best way to say it. Often we look at problem breeds, problem morphs, problem color combinations. In horses, for example, there’s a lot of work done to deal with things like lethal white genes, and the foal dies quite soon after birth. But in horses, how they’ve managed to deal with that is you can test your animals to see what colors they are. You can see what the unseen genes are. So, um, Phenotype is what you see. Genotype is what you’ve got. There’s normally an extra well, there is an extra set that you can’t see. In some cases, in some cases you need to have two to show it. So in which case you know what they both are. Guppies probably have that same lethal white gene. Nobody’s testing for that. We can’t even prove it’s definitely a thing because so little testing has been done. There was some evidence of it back in, I want to say the forties. And then it could have been later. I haven’t got that paper in front of me, but it was a while ago that they they suggested this and it’s never really been proven or disproven. But looking at the evidence, I think there’s a very good chance that guppies do have this lethal white gene where the young will either not develop properly or die very soon after birth. At no point have I ever seen someone going, ooh, not a good idea to breed those two together because half the offspring will die, or whatever percentage of the offspring will die. We seem to have completely forgotten that welfare should start with the choice of fish. And I think. I think I’d just like it. You know, one of those. If I could change something in the world, what would it be? I think people need to think that fish need to be able to thrive in their tanks. And that starts with choosing a fish that can swim remain upright, which I think is sort of under the swimming thing. Eat and breathe. I’d also like display relatively natural behaviors, but then you’re starting to get into all the other color morphs. Um, because then you’ve got problems there. I mean, does a fish with an electric blue color morph or a black color morph? Is that able to display stress markings or breeding markings in the same way that a wild type would? We don’t know, because we’re not doing the studies because we don’t seem to care. And I think that’s a really bad position to be in. These are living, breathing creatures. And even if you’re one of these people that says, yeah, but fish don’t have these feelings, fish aren’t aware of life, fish don’t feel pain. And I totally disagree with you, by the way, and science does as well. It’s not just me pulling theories out of the thin air. Even if you’re one of those people, you are still aware of these things. You are meant to be the higher life form. So what you’re saying is by saying, oh, it doesn’t matter, because they’re not able to make that choice for themselves, you’re making it for them. Now here’s one thing I’m going to have to say. We’ve all been there. We’ve walked into a shop, we’ve seen something cute, and we’ve gone, oh, poor sod, I’ll take that home with me. We need to stop doing that. So it’s called the rescue marketing. It’s well known for selling fish tanks. There’s quite a few people who do it. They get tiny fish tank. They shove huge fish in there, which, by the way, couldn’t have grown in there. So they’ve put large fish in there deliberately. Point one. And then they put the the tank up on marketplace for a ridiculous amount. Those, um, column tanks that you see, I saw one recently. The column tank would have been four hundred quid brand new. It was an absolutely battered one going for five hundred and thirty five pounds, but it had six huge Oscars in it. I hate to say you can pick up huge Oscars for pennies or free, because so many people buy them and they outgrow their tanks. So there wasn’t a great cost there. So that person, it was second hand. It was used this tank, but they could have gone and bought it new, maybe a few quid on the Oscars and still made what, one hundred and thirty quid profit as it is, this wasn’t new. They probably picked it up off eBay for a tenth the original price, and basically made damn near five hundred quid’s profit rescue marketing. I think there’s a little bit to do with that with the short bodied jeans and parrot face. Parrot fish with the deformed faces. Um, fish being bred with no fins in cases. Uh notched angelfish with a deliberately bred to have great big holes, sort of in the profile of the fish and things like that. So I think this is one of the things we’ve got to be careful of when we buy a fish. Not only are we buying that fish, but we’re sending a message back to the breeder in probably in Asia for the bulk of the fish that come into the UK, and I am specifically talking about fresh water. I don’t think Marines got as much of an issue with this as we do in freshwater. Happy to be proven wrong. I know that clownfish are going into more morphs than I can count right now, but we’re sending a message back to the breeder that actually, this is what people want. People don’t want a nice, healthy, um, Midas. Midas cichlids. They’re phenomenally good red devils, if you want. I’ve kept them both. Love them. Absolutely. Great fish. They get quite big. They are aggressive. Nobody’s saying they’re not. Or, um, true green terrors. Even orange psalms. I do actually like Psalms. But instead, what we end up buying is brightly colored, often dyed parrots. Why? They have the same instincts and behaviors as the other cichlids I’ve just mentioned. They get bigger than some of them. The only difference is they’re two disabled to actually be able to deal with it. And I don’t think that’s a great reason to buy a fish. Molly’s. Molly’s get to. Molly’s a quite big fish. Well, if you buy the short bodied, it will stay smaller. Yeah, but it’s still going to have the same metabolism as the originals. It just doesn’t live as long. So what you’re saying is I’m going to buy an unhealthy fish, so it dies sooner so it doesn’t get to its full size. And I think this is where the problems come in. Balloon fish are another problem. Some balloon fish are just a short bodied buddy Gene and just makes them look a bit rounder. Some of them have different genes to make them look more plumper. I think is the word maybe to look for there. But I do think the bulk of those it’s just the same gene for as short bodied. So what do we need to do. And I say we being aware that I am involved in this equation, I think we need to have maybe our own deleterious genes policy. That’s a word I’ll come up with. And I think we need to look at the health of each individual fish before we buy it. Things I would avoid. Fish that are known to have health issues in terms of neon tetra disease, dwarf gourami disease, or dwarf gourami iridovirus camallanus in guppies is well known and frequent. For a while, there were several species of fish that you could almost guarantee you were going to get fish TB in with them, but that seems to have been dealt with for some of them, so I’m not going to name any of those right now after we’ve decided they’re probably going to be disease free. Are they going to live a long, healthy life in the size of tank that we can provide for them? And then can they do the basics? Can they swim? Can they breathe? Can they eat? And yes, to a certain extent, can they show natural behaviors with each other? So I’m not just talking about buying a healthy fish. I’m talking about buying a fish that has all its body parts in the right places. That’s generally what I’m saying. After you’ve decided that you need to look at fish that suit your waters and these sorts of things, and I think this is really important and something that’s not being looked at as much as it could be in Fishkeeping. Nobody wants to kill their animals. I know plenty of people who’ve bought fish thinking it’s just a fish and actually come to love the little buggers. And that’s reality, that that’s a very clear reality that we know, we know is out there. What’s your thoughts? I genuinely want to know what people’s thoughts are, because I think one of my big problems is I get heavily swamped by people saying things like, does it matter if a fish can’t swim? It’s not like it’s in the wild. Does it matter? It’s only a fish. And I’m aware that I get swamped because the way the algorithms work is that when I say stuff on social media, the angry people come out the woodwork. But it would actually be really nice to hear from the non angry people, the people who may have a view similar to mine but think this, this or this needs tweaking. How would this work on a practical level, do you think shops should start should stop selling these things? Do you think the government should remove these off the list of fish that were allowed to import? Do you think it’s just up to customers to say to shops, we’re not going to buy that anymore? Do you think that there should be more education? I mean, literally, that’s what this organization is about, educating fish keepers. So do you think that needs to be where we step it up? I’ve got a bad feeling everyone’s going to say yes there. But yeah. Guys, can you just fill me in on what you’re thinking? Because I think I’ve rambled on about this long enough. What are your deleterious genes that you really think should be removed from fishkeeping? What are your problem species? And yeah, how can we help? Thanks so much, guys. If you like what we’re doing, could you support us over on Patreon? Can you go and like us on social media across the social medias? Um, by that, I think I’ve actually cut it down now. So we’ve got Facebook, Instagram, blue Sky, Reddit. There’s a subreddit. I keep forgetting that one. Um, yeah, we don’t do much on X or Mastodon anymore. We’re not on medium. I have it for all the channels, but not for the Fishkeeping one. Oh yeah, on the website tropical Fish Keeping Dot Co dot UK. Thank you so much for joining me guys. And you should probably hear from me on Wednesday.