I really have no specific answer to your question of the possible ratio of resulting fry between orandas and telescopes. I have a friend whose fry might have been a possible mix of telescope and this is his first batch but I suspect only his orandas spawned even though he noted he combined them with two telescopes. I wish I had asked her to obtain this information before but she just disappeared from a goldfish forum I regularly frequent. I've witnessed someone who owned a oranda x telescope cross but she never asked a previous source if they had breeding information of this. If yours are "dome-shaped", I think you're referring to spherical. I've bred only orandas but do plan to try telescopes later on and I had done a lot of reading on Joseph Smartt's Goldfish Genetics book.Īnyway, I wanted you to note there are four eye forms of telescopes to begin with.Īccording to Joseph Smartt, author of the Goldfish Genetics handbook, the globe eyes often sport the truncated cones whereas the moors, especially broadtails, sport a more spherical eye form. You have to understand though genetics in goldfish is so understudied and with almost a hundred variants already available (and some completely wiped out as a result of lack of studies to retain their standard appearance) especially with telescopes, genetics is bound to be way too complex. As Professor Eiberg says, "it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.Doh! I tried to post last night but my other laptop is too slow. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human's chance of survival. The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour. Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production. "From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," says Professor Eiberg. Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.
If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour - a condition known as albinism. The switch's effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore.
The "switch," which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris - effectively "diluting" brown eyes to blue.
"But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a "switch," which literally "turned off" the ability to produce brown eyes." The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. "Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.