I have 2 juvie green terrors with a young electric blue acara in my small tank. I was at the LFS and there were some fish being advertised as "not for sale yet", but the employee there who is always really knowledgeable said the few fish were electric blue acara/green terror hybrids. They were real interesting looking, a darker shade of green with some blue but not like a young EBJD. I always thought the breeding habits of an EB Acara were difficult. I have not heard of any cross breeding as of yet. I should go back for a picture, maybe even pick one up if they are not ridiculously priced like an EBJD is. Anyone seen or heard of this mix? My juvie GTs barely have any color while my juvie EB Acara is beautiful at the same size. The supposed hybrid did look like a "combination of the two".
Electric Blue Acara/Green Terror Hybrid?
- Thread starter thestig20
- Start date
Considering we aren't 100% sure if the EBA is a hybrid or just a mutation occurring in a particular species, I think anything is fair game.
EBA x EBA breed true but if you cross an EBA with a standard blue acara, all of the fry should look like normal blue acara. Therefore a hybrid GT x EBA would be normally colored fish. To get any EB traits to show up, you'd have to either breed the fry together, or breed one of the fry back to the parent EBA.
Hey there. They can definitely cross breed. I have had a male green terror breed with a female electric blue and currently have 5 generations of the babies of different sizes in a 135 Gallon tank.
The first batch I only managed to save a single one. The second batch around 20 of them made it and are around 1 to 1.5" each in the tank. The third batch there are around 19 of them separated from the rest as they are still too small at only around 1/4", and the fourth batch just hatched around 4 days ago. I have around 150 of them separated.
If you search google for "Electric Blue Acara Green Terror Hybrid" you will see three videos I put up of them on Youtube. I will put up another video shortly as they are decently larger than the last one. As Ryan said about their coloring, right now they look a lot more like standard Blue Acara than EBA. The horizontal stripe that is not really present on an EB is completely visible on all of the babies of every generation. Though of course they can fade it in and out completely. Sometimes we will look in the tank and cant find a single fish with a horizontal stripe, and just 10 seconds later they will all have it.
They are a bit more colorful and vivid than normal Blue Acara, which probably comes from the Green Terror father who is very pretty, but they do not look Electric Blue at all.
Once they get larger I plan to try two different things. Breeding some together to see what they look like with the electric trait back, and also to move a few into the pure EBA tank and see if I can breed the electric back into them that way also, ending up with 25% GT and 75% EBA.
The father:
The Mother:
First Hybrid in front w/ Second batch behind:
Fourth and most recent batch:
The Mother:
First Hybrid in front w/ Second batch behind:
Fourth and most recent batch:
Yeah, I was pretty surprised as well. I am interested in seeing what they look like when they get to be closer to full size, since they are half green terror, it would be very odd if they remained looking almost completely like regular blue acaras to me.
I think breeding blue acara and green terrors would be a bad idea if they're being sold by a shop, many people find it difficult to differentiate between the two as it is, bringing cross breeds of the two that wouldn't look much different from either parent into the hobby would just further complicate things..
I myself have not seen any cross-breeds being sold around me in any of my local shops.
I had some folks on youtube message me about purchasing some of these, but I wanted to wait for their colors to come in more and see if they are actually easy to differentiate, which they are not at all. Shall see what happens when the electric gene breeds back in, may just be more of the same.
I had some folks on youtube message me about purchasing some of these, but I wanted to wait for their colors to come in more and see if they are actually easy to differentiate, which they are not at all. Shall see what happens when the electric gene breeds back in, may just be more of the same.
