Synodontis hybrids: Why?

[corybreed]

I know there has been a few threads recently discussing Synodontis hybrids. I will be giving the African catfish talk at the upcoming catfish convention and I will discuss hybrids in the hobby. My question which I am throwing out for discussion is Why? If Synodontis are being bred successfully in Europe, with hormone injections, why not breed true. Why create so called new species. I am sure there is a market for true tank raised Synodontis angelicus, granulosus, ornatipinnis etc.

Mark

[grahams]

The reason for hybrid Synos is the same as for any other fish,money.To breed something like multipuncs in the conventional way is to difficult and the yield of fry not very many.Cross it with Eupterus you get a lot more fry.Many people with one or two tanks buy a fish because they like the look of it, and, if the price is reasonable they buy it,only when it starts growing at a rather fast rate do they try to find out what they have.Unlike those who are dedicated to the hobby, want to keep our stock true, and enjoy searching out the odd rarity, hybrids initially aren`t a concern to them.The breeders in Europe and the far East are dependant on selling as many fish as they can,and create that market by developing hybrids of popular fish.If they can`t spawn those popular fish true,hybrids are the next best thing.Personally I have a distaste for all hybrids but many others don`t,particularly in the far East and the market there is big.Hybrids can make a lot of money there.Remember the Flowerhorn Cichlid,It sold for huge amounts of money.
Our LFS have to take some blame by stocking them.If they sell them as hybrids that is at least being honest, but my biggest concern is they are often sold with a valid species tag,that to me is not being at all acceptable.Sidguppy came up with an excellent idea recently,suggesting sending in photographs of known hybrids,a sort of "Rogues Gallery" if you like. perhaps our revered leader (Jools)might like to consider that.Something desperately needs to be done and it isn`t just Synos.

[Dinyar]

I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying, grahams.

Your first point seems to be that cross-breeding two different species results in more fry than breeding a single species. Can you cite any studies to support this observation?

Your second point -- that breeders hybridize in search of the next big hit fish -- sounds plausible, but begs the question of why they focus on Synodontis species. Why not hybridize pretty Hypancistrus or Puntius species, for example?

The market for tropical fish in the "Far East" (excluding Japan) is small compared to W Europe and the US, but more to the point, the Synodontis hybrids we see apparently come from E Europe and are marketed in the West.

[MatsP]

In previous discussions, the point has been made that it's easier to cross species, because you can take a male of the rare species and cross it with a female of a common species - since there is some great risk to the parents, it's much easier to get a "rare-looking" specie by doing it this way. [One presumes here that the parents are wild-caught, so therefore expensive to the farmer, and if they are rare, then they become even more expensive, so there's some merit to this theory].

There may be other factors too.

And this is just speculation repeated, so I'm not able to cite any scientific papers on the subject.

Ultimately, however, the point of creating hybrids has to be money - whether the purpose is to create a different specie (more beautiful) or bigger broods... If it was just the same, I don't see any reason why they wouldn't just cross like-for-like. But somehow, there must be MORE money to be made from the hybrids... And of course, one reason for that is that the hybrids are salable. If they didn't sell, there would be no money to be made...

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Mats

[grahams]

Sorry Dinyar, but I don`t under stand your point either.If multipuncs spawn in their conventional manner,i.e. cuckoo spawning,how many fry do you get?Cross with Eupterus ,how many do you get? O.K. there are reports of cases of egg scattering in hobbyists tanks, but that can`t be depended on.You don`t need studies to give the answer to that.I under stand the point you are making regarding the other types you have given, but whose to say they won`t?Your point about the Far East is intriguing,I thought Japan was in the Far East,At least it is in the U.K.,and when I was last there.They have a totally different culture towards animals of any kind in Japan,They believe they were put on this earth for human benefit and not as living creatures in their own right.Going back to your second paragraph,"big hit" are your words ,not mine, and I didn`t mean just to make a quick buck, but why else are they in business other than to sell as much as they can and earn money. Take S. Granuolsus as an example,they haven`t managed to spawn it successfully yet in any real numbers, so have produced cheaper hybrids.If its not for money why else would they do it.I am not saying that all hybrids Synos are coming out of the Far East,but many from Europe are going there.The Far East is notorious though for producing all types of hybrids ,take Singapore and their Discus and various longfinned whatevers,to me they are still hybrids,or at least they are not natural.I am not putting all blame on the Far East. We also have people(wholesaler)doing it in the U.K.Lee Finley also has an article on hybrids, on Shanes world, on a different genus.I would be interested to hear his view on Syno hybrids and why he thinks hybridising is happening.On a final note I have many books on catfish,that say under the Syno species heading,"breeding: unknown" and they are not always old books.

[MatsP]

I would like to make it very clear, that whilst Long Fins, albinos and weird colour variations are not natural, they aren't (generally) caused by hybridization - mixing two different species.

I'm not disagreeing that the "Far east" produces a whole horde of "weird" fish, balloon-shapes, long fins, albino's etc. But I eblieve Dinyar has a good point in that the fish are definitely produced in "Eastern block" countries. I have a sneaky suspicion that this is based on old Iron Curtain research that has been put into private profit making...

But you certainly have a point in that for example S. granulosis can be sold for â?¬200+, it's certainly very tempting to get ONE of them, cross it with something cheap and productive, and get LOTS of "granulosis" that you can sell for lots of money.

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Mats

[Mike_Noren]

Well, I don't know, but I can speculate...

* It is known that the fish often die as a result of the injection and subsequent stripping of eggs & milt, meaning the breeder has an incentive to use cheap broodstock, while hybrids don't sell for a lower price than purebreds.

* The availability of rare Synodontis in europe in general, and the eastern bloc in particular, is VERY low, and the prices are high. Should a breeder be able to get hold of a group, likely through import from Germany, he'd be tempted to breed them to cheaper & common species in order to maximize number of offspring before the group is used up. Provided he at all can afford more than one fish, that is.

* It's a cottage industry, where many of the actual breeders are both uninterested and unable to tell the different species apart. <Personally I doubt there's much truth to this.>

* Hybrids typically grow faster and to a larger final size, and are healthier, than the pure species (a phenomenon known as 'hybrid vigor'). <Personally I believe this is the chief reason.>

As for "why Synodontis", there is a whole industry in the Czech republic concerned with producing & selling fish hormone kits and developing protocols for individual species. My guess is that Synodontis just so happen to be an easy group of fish to reproduce artificially, and that there exists a readily available kit & protocol to do it.

[grahams]

.I generally agree with much of what Mats and Mike have said, but if you check back to what I said in my post,was, that in my view I regard them as hybrids,meaning I personally view them as no better than hybrids.I know they come from selective breeding, but look what they have done to goldfish.I don`t think I have singled out the Far East either as being the culprits for all the hybrid Synos`.It isn`t easy to get many of the desirable species in the U.K.and I have felt quite envious reading about some of the species others have,but I wouldn`t want to buy hybrids,(although I did recently out of curiosity buy a couple that were advertised as Nigromaculatus)but other people do so unknowingly and knowingly ,so while there is a market for them the producers will try to take advantage of it.I personally doubt that many breeders don`t know what they are crossing Mike,and are they really bothered how big they grow or how quickly?Many Synodontis are rare in the hobby,when they are avaiable they are expensive,and there are still many that cannot be bred in commercial quantities,if at all,these facts alone are surely enough to encourage breeding them and I am sure that many breeders don`t think they are doing any harm, but at the end of the day it still comes down to the money they can earn.I know we are discussing this across different countries,as a consequence markets and prices will differ,but here in the U.K. "some" of the hybrids are sold for less than the true species,i.e. hybrid Granulosus recently sold by a retailer for £60.00ea and the N`maculatus mentioned earlier £3.50ea.for good sized fish.

[MatsP]

Lets not get bogged down with details of why and how. The problem (I think we can all agree it is, in many ways, a problem) exists and the questions asked by Mark is still to some extent unanswered:

Why not breed true species. And I thin Mike Noren's answer is one of the more likely: It's hard/expensive to get a pair of for example S. granulosis - it's much easier to just get one and cross it with some other species, and get something that LOOKS similar, but spending less money. Also, since there's risks involved, using a rare specimen together with a common one makes "double the spawn" for little extra money outlay (one cheap and one expensive parent).

The other factor is "try to find the next big hit", like Flowerhorn cichlids that (used to) fetch crazy amounts of money.

Mike also touches on a good theory of why Syno's - because that's a known entity with many similar species - so it's easy to hybridize them. No matter what amount of chemicals you inject to the body of a Hypostomus, it won't cross with a Neon Tetra to make a Neon Hypostomus...

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Mats

[grahams]

As MatsP has said the question of syno hybrids is a problem,but generally to the enthusiasts,such as the people such as those who visit forums such as this.It is also a fact that those chosen mainly for hybridising are those where one of the parent species is desirable,in demand and has a ready market.
I have stated my views on hybrids and line bred fish many times,but does anyone know how many Synodontis species there are and how many of those species are being hybridised?This is intended as a genuine question as I honestly have no idea.I know one hybrid for the fishkeeping hobby is too many,I would be quite interested to find out the percentages, so are we perhaps making it a bigger issue than it is.Can anyone actually list all the Syno species that have, or are, being hybridised.Some other species(not Syno`s, at least I don`t think they are) are being hybridised for the food industry in third world countries,is that wrong?What we think is wrong is when they then sell those fish into the pet trade.No Syno is an easy fish to breed,the buying public like them,particularly the lake species,the breeders recognise this and breed them the easiest way they can.Supply and demand= money

[MatsP]

There are several different looking fish that are classified as hybrids. How many? I don't really know - and unless you can get hold of the people who come up with the "recepies" for the drugs involved and which species they work on (perhaps all?), there's no way to really determine the number of hybrids. I would think that only a handfull of species are actually "created" by hybridization. Heok Hee Ng (Silurus on the forum) shows pictures of four different variants in his "how to tell a real from a fake" article. Here.

Searching the Forum with "Synodontis hybrid" matching both words gives two pages [in the "What's my cathish" forum only] of hits, and when I scanned the first dozen or so, more than half of the fish in question are identified as hybrids.

Speaking of which: there may well be a difference between the fish produced from, say, a Male S. granulosis and a Female S. eupterus and the opposite M/F pair... There is in horse+donkey...

There are roughly 90 species of Synodontis in the Cat-eLog, fishbase lists 119 valid species.

In theory these can all be compined to create some 118 * 118 (of course you don't get another species from crossing with itself, so it's 118 here): 13924 combinations.



What I mean with a problem, however, isn't the number of hybrid variants created, but rather the fact that humans are CREATING them... I don't care, really, if they create only one variant or hundreds - the problem is still that they are not the natural, wild, variety of the fish.

And I _DO_ see a big difference between inbreeding/line-breeding with human selection - I don't like that either - I prefer fish that are natural looking. But in comparison, it's a near-natural behaviour to line-breed fish, and it's completely unnatural to hybridize [yes, I am aware that there are natural occuring hybrids, some which are also fertile - that's slightly different because there are no humans (directly) involved in this].

However, it is a moral problem in my view - humans messing with things they have no business messing with, and PURELY for monetary gain - we're not talking about a new way to produce spare parts for humans or some such - which can be a different debate, and I do have some sympathy for both sides of that sort of "human messing with things".

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Mats

[grahams]

Hi Mats, I think we are all saying very much the same thing really,why do we need to interfere with nature,It is rare to find a hybrid that is more beautiful than the ones that were created by nature.
My reasoning for saying that I view line breeding as the same thing is that it is still human interferance and we only have to look at what has happened to the goldfish.For example, lets take the Celestial and common goldfish,both are Cassius Auratus but you would never know by looking at them.In someway that is worse than hybridising because in my mind that is just plain cruel. They have developed misshapen fish that cannot swim properly,have swimbladder difficulties because of their misshapen bodies and are also struggling because of oversized finnage.I also remember seeing Guppies with such large tails that they swam almost vertically in the water.At least we can be thankful that that doesn`t happen with hybrid Synos.Thats not to say I condone any forms of hybridising,I don`t,I abhor, them but If we condemn hybrids we have to condemn the others.Anyway that`s taken us right of course from the original subject,but generally I think your views and mine are not far apart.

[sidguppy]

the difference with Goldfish is that Goldies aren't mixed with, for example, tigerbarbs.
it's a single species and the weird linebred varieties haven't ousted the original regular Goldie out of the trade; you can still buy run off the mill goldfish with a normal shape (1 tailfin, normal eyes, normal finnage) everywhere.

With syno's this is sadly not the case.
not only are the Mad Professors in their Hybrid-Hell laboratories making the Syno-mutts by the million; those hybrids are fouling up the market by being 2 or more species mixed up in 1 fish.
and even worse: due to them being cheap, easy to get by (because bred and sold in millions) and because many LFs and wholesalers don't have exactly a healthy dose of ethics (apart from money grabbing ethics that is) the hybrids ARE in fact outcompeting the real species right out of the market!

Synodontis njassae anyone?
seen a REAL njassae lately? how about a fake one?
99 out of 100 LFs take the cop-out way; they order a bunch of 'lookalike' njassae's for a nickle and a dime, sell them with a big fat pricetag to unsuspecting Malawi-fishkeepers as the real "malawi catfish" and almost nobody's the wiser.....

fewer and fewer traders take the effort of ordering/importing the real honest-to-god njassae (wich is hard to come by and harder to come by as we type) and give their customers the chance of buying a genuine Malawian cat for their Riftlake biotope.

I also see that happening with the Tanganyikans; granulosus for a small part (cheap granny's anyone? loads of rip off in that apartment), but multipunctatus are already undercut by dozens of LFS who buy the hybrids and sell them off as the real Chuckoo cat.
a hybrid can be bought for almost nada in huge numbers; breeding Chuckoo cats is a lot more effort, not in the least because you must be a succesfull cichlidkeeper as well.

THIS is the REAL DANGER in the whole hybrid issue; true species being undercut and ousted out of the market due to unscrupulous LFS/wholesalers and entrepeneurs who fool unsuspecting hobbyists into buying rubbish with a genuine name and pricetag.
In time it's almost impossible to get hold of the real species, something wich has already happened to Synodontis njassae, wich has becaome almost impossible to get.

[grahams]

I really don`t understand what is the issue here.I agree with almost 100% of what you have said and the others who have posted their views, and have said as much in earlier postings, but I am entitled to my opinion that line breeding can be just as bad, and I use the various strains of goldfish as an example, you can add to that wierd shaped Discus with strange colours, I never see the original wild strains of them in our local shops, and aren`t they created by man just as much as Syno hybrids. As things stand true species of Synodontis are still available here in the U.K.,although I agree you have to hunt them down,I bought 16 of them of various species 2 weeks ago.
I am genuinely confused about your comments on Njassae,and honestly hadn`t been aware that they were such a big problem.Surely they are being brought in wild, direct from the lake, as are several of the Tanganykan catfish, but clearly not enough to satisfy demand.I was offered wild caught Njassae only 2 weeks ago and turned them down.
I was in a shop yesterday that had true Multipunctatus, Petricola ,Decorous,Polli and others available,albeit some had hefty price tags.
I am not saying a problem doesn`t exist,I believe it does, with the potential of getting much worse.As catfish enthusiasts we fear it more than most,but lets keep it in proportion while still doing what we can to try and stifle the problem.I have said Sid,elsewhere on the forum,that I think your idea of a "Syno rogues gallery" is an excellent idea,let`s ask Jools his opinion and see if we can`t get that put in place.You can boycott the shops selling hybrids, there are probably a lot of other things could be done through the aquatic press.The PFK dyed fish campaign seems to have had an impact in the U.K. but whether an anti-hybrid campaign would be met with the same enthusiasm I don`t know.If fish are not available in the required numbers as wild stock, and they cannot be bred in their true form,that puts pressure on supply,the breeders have clearly recognised this and are producing mongrels to fill the gap.Taking a slightly different view,if all those people who are buying these mongrels were to buy the true species it would put more pressure on supply making the genuine article even harder to get and more expensive still.
It clearly comes down to the popularity of the Syno in the end, but an amount of honesty from the breeders and dealers would go a long way to help.

[Mike_Noren]

I'm not against line breeding, and I've seen some gorgeous neon-yellow Synos which obviously were, but I consider it fraud to sell hybrids under the name of a true species.

If a hybrid were sold as "Synodontis granulosus X eupterus" then I'm OK with it, but I'm not OK with it being sold as "Synodontis granulosus". In fact I would wager it is even illegal to do so.

It's like buying fillet of Sole at the fishmonger and getting Plaice; or ordering a German Shepherd puppy and getting an animal that's half poodle.

That doesn't mean that fillet of Plaice doesn't taste nice, or that a German Shepherd x Poodle cross can not be a very nice animal - it's just not what I paid for.

[apistomaster]

Money always seems the bottom line as to why OTF are hybidized or hormoned after hatching. In both cases fish are produced that are eagerly purchased by the less concerned casual fish keeper.
The side effect is that only unbreedable fish get sold and over time these artficial fish displace the wild or wild type phenotypes which cannot be bred by anyone making a monopoly for the artificial fish producers. Some of the fish that come to mind other than Synodontis are the different varities of Dwarf and or honey gouramis. Although surely isolated markets still have some original natural types most don't. The females are hardly ever offered and when they are they have been chemical neutered by exposure to the hormones. It is an insidious unethical practice that is not ultimately in the best interest to the hobby.
Larry

[grahams]

I do agree with most points you have made.I prefer my fish as how they are in nature, but each is entitled to their opinion."Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"the saying goes.The difficulties I have with line/inbreeding is in the long term the fish become weaker and the bad characteristics of fish are rebred into the fish,that is how some of them are created and personally I find them grotesque.I know I am moving away from the thread a bit too much,but take Koi carp,they have been inbred for so long,and while I agree many of them are stunning to look at, their life expectancy has been halved to that of the common carp from which they have been derived,their resistance to disease also appears to be less.I don`t want to see that in my beloved African fish,nor do I want to see veiltailed Petricola or anything else.I would agree Mike, it must be bordering illegal selling hybrids as genuine species,probably under the Trade Descritions Act.
Larry, your point on females is also true,I have tried extremely hard to obtain female E.Melanogenys for months.I finally managed to get 6 several months ago,that had come from the Czech republic and they turned out to be all males,what are the chances of that happening normally.My theory at the time was that they were holding back females to spawn and selling off the excess males.It is as you say unethical,and certainly not in the best interest of the enthusiast hobbyist,but those with just one smallish show tank, in the most part, either don`t know what goes on or don`t care.

[Richard B]

Graham - can i ask where you saw the S.Polli on the 15th?

If you don't want to show name the retailer in the forum you can email me. I am always wary of naming retailers openly in any circumstances as opinions are purely personal of what a great/good/not-so-good shop are.

Thanks Richard B