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Wtb scarlet badis pair (females are hard to find)

IndianaSam

CCA Members
They had seven of them at L Londontownetropicals , but I bought all of them. Not sure if any are female, but there are some drab looking ones in there so I’m hopeful.
 

Shichimi

CCA Members
They had seven of them at L Londontownetropicals , but I bought all of them. Not sure if any are female, but there are some drab looking ones in there so I’m hopeful.
London Town told me they only ordered males. They didn’t select the female options. So the drab ones are probably males.
 

JLW

CCA Members
So, I and others have noticed something interesting about the sexual dichromatism of the scarlet badis. There's really not much of an economic incentive for these to be selected by sex at any point in the chain. They're simply not a high end enough fish for someone to sit there and toss back all the "drab" females, especially when one considers what they likely look like just out of the water.

Yet, there's an incredible lack of drab females. Wildly, like 98% of the fish in the trade are not drab, and thus "males."

I, and others, have had tanks with nothing but colourful fish, supposedly all males, and bred them.

There seems to be two phenotypes of females (or perhaps of scarlet badis generally). One has an incredibly drab female, and the other has a less colourful female, but not drab.
 

Shichimi

CCA Members
So, I and others have noticed something interesting about the sexual dichromatism of the scarlet badis. There's really not much of an economic incentive for these to be selected by sex at any point in the chain. They're simply not a high end enough fish for someone to sit there and toss back all the "drab" females, especially when one considers what they likely look like just out of the water.

Yet, there's an incredible lack of drab females. Wildly, like 98% of the fish in the trade are not drab, and thus "males."

I, and others, have had tanks with nothing but colourful fish, supposedly all males, and bred them.

There seems to be two phenotypes of females (or perhaps of scarlet badis generally). One has an incredibly drab female, and the other has a less colourful female, but not drab.
Do you have any pairs for sell?
 

IndianaSam

CCA Members
I’d tend to agree with you, Josh. Unless the answer is that females are 100 times more frail than males then I can think of a dozen better reasons than “98% of the fish are males”.

So, I and others have noticed something interesting about the sexual dichromatism of the scarlet badis. There's really not much of an economic incentive for these to be selected by sex at any point in the chain. They're simply not a high end enough fish for someone to sit there and toss back all the "drab" females, especially when one considers what they likely look like just out of the water.

Yet, there's an incredible lack of drab females. Wildly, like 98% of the fish in the trade are not drab, and thus "males."

I, and others, have had tanks with nothing but colourful fish, supposedly all males, and bred them.

There seems to be two phenotypes of females (or perhaps of scarlet badis generally). One has an incredibly drab female, and the other has a less colourful female, but not drab.
 

JLW

CCA Members
I’d tend to agree with you, Josh. Unless the answer is that females are 100 times more frail than males then I can think of a dozen better reasons than “98% of the fish are males”.

So, I thought perhaps the same thing was going on with Sawbwa rasboras. You tend to get 98% males with those, too. And, like the Dario, they're a tiny little fish that no one in their right mind is going to go through and filter females. I never saw how it is worthwhile -- especially when you consider that you're likely seining a bunch of these guys. Given their stronger sexual dichromatism and dimorphism, it's certainly possible that you get a seine full, and "that's one, that's one, that's a female, toss it back, that's one, female, female, toss, toss, that's a dragonfly nymph, etc."

But, in this case, it turns out there's something really nefarious going on. When you put 500 of these guys in a big trough, waiting shipment to the exporter, or when they're in that bare tank at the wholesaler, they act a lot differently than what you'll see in your home tank (or maybe not that differently). We think of some of these fish like this as "schooling" fish, but they're not. Instead, juveniles and females school, while males shoal, usually setting up territories and harassing females. When they're pushed into tight quarters, the males respond to all the other males around them by dialing their hormones up to 11. They get super colourful, and they get super...

Hey, who is in charge of banning people from the forum? Whoever it is, don't read this post, okay?

They get super enthusiastic and, I'm going to use the word "randy". They immediately go from "Hey, sweetheart, how about you and I duck into the cabomba?" to acting like a 1970s construction crew. And there's nowhere for the females to seek respite.

So, you have a trough with 500 of them in there, and you lose 100 of them going to the exporter, and the you lose another 100 on the way to wholesaler, and you lose another 50 on the way to the retailer... and virtually all 250 of those are females.

And, somewhere early in that chain, they figure this out -- probably at the initial holding facility, which is buying from the collectors. They're not dumb, they tell the collectors, "I'm not paying you for the ugly ones that always die, just toss those back."

And, wham, there's your incentive to collect only males, which only exacerbates the problems for whatever females slip through (now instead of 250 males harassing 250 females, you have a tank with 450 males and 50 females -- those females definitely don't last).

So, while this is probably not applicable to female scarlet badis, it could be a component. Store populations may be male heavy, regardless of selection by the collectors / breeders / etc. because the females experience higher attrition along the chain.
 

Becca

Members
So, I thought perhaps the same thing was going on with Sawbwa rasboras. You tend to get 98% males with those, too. And, like the Dario, they're a tiny little fish that no one in their right mind is going to go through and filter females. I never saw how it is worthwhile -- especially when you consider that you're likely seining a bunch of these guys. Given their stronger sexual dichromatism and dimorphism, it's certainly possible that you get a seine full, and "that's one, that's one, that's a female, toss it back, that's one, female, female, toss, toss, that's a dragonfly nymph, etc."

But, in this case, it turns out there's something really nefarious going on. When you put 500 of these guys in a big trough, waiting shipment to the exporter, or when they're in that bare tank at the wholesaler, they act a lot differently than what you'll see in your home tank (or maybe not that differently). We think of some of these fish like this as "schooling" fish, but they're not. Instead, juveniles and females school, while males shoal, usually setting up territories and harassing females. When they're pushed into tight quarters, the males respond to all the other males around them by dialing their hormones up to 11. They get super colourful, and they get super...

Hey, who is in charge of banning people from the forum? Whoever it is, don't read this post, okay?

They get super enthusiastic and, I'm going to use the word "randy". They immediately go from "Hey, sweetheart, how about you and I duck into the cabomba?" to acting like a 1970s construction crew. And there's nowhere for the females to seek respite.

So, you have a trough with 500 of them in there, and you lose 100 of them going to the exporter, and the you lose another 100 on the way to wholesaler, and you lose another 50 on the way to the retailer... and virtually all 250 of those are females.

And, somewhere early in that chain, they figure this out -- probably at the initial holding facility, which is buying from the collectors. They're not dumb, they tell the collectors, "I'm not paying you for the ugly ones that always die, just toss those back."

And, wham, there's your incentive to collect only males, which only exacerbates the problems for whatever females slip through (now instead of 250 males harassing 250 females, you have a tank with 450 males and 50 females -- those females definitely don't last).

So, while this is probably not applicable to female scarlet badis, it could be a component. Store populations may be male heavy, regardless of selection by the collectors / breeders / etc. because the females experience higher attrition along the chain.

Ooooh... this seems like a good hypothesis for how male heavy Dicrossus shipments tend to be. I thought maybe it had to do with behavior and collection strategy - for example, among Dicrossus, females tend to stay low and hide in leaf litter a bit more than males. I've definitely seen female fish harassed to death by overly excited males, though.
 
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