This is the update of my tosakin project.

To refresh a little bit, I had bred Tosakin for many years alone with not much success. Then a friend of mine, mr Dibyo, offered his support in acquiring some good quality tosakin babies from the Izumi Line, Japan. We bought 40 in total. Sadly, they were hard to breed. Mostly the eggs did not hatch, or hatched in a weak condition and died immediately. There were rare occasion when the eggs hatched properly, but when it was time to cull, it became apparent that most of the offspring had defected dorsal fins. The defect could amount to more than 90%. It was a hopeless case.

But by that time, I had a male grey tosakin from Thailand which I acquired before. Since it was the only male I had, I crossed it with butterfly goldfish, and did backcrossing to the father for several generations. I tried to acquire decent tosakin by doing so, but it never happened to my satisfaction. Finally, I gave up the grey old fellow. He was very old and unable to swim. Mr Dibyo asked for the fish, gave him extraordinary care which I could not give, and he even succeeded to mate him with the Izumi line! And the result was fantastic! We called it the DBS line, under mr Dibyo’s name.

Mr Dibyo gave me lots of the F2 of that line, which he let me pick by myself. Mr Dibyo and I had different preferences concerning the tail. He would like to breed those with beautiful large middle tail, while I would like to focus on the fish with strong flips. I picked up those with flips always open even when swimming, with less regard on the beauty of the middle tail. Well, it was hard to get both features at that moment. But surely, it was our dream.

These are the four I kept for my parent fish: one male and three female.

The male:

The three female:

The mating is still hard for me. The fertile eggs are few. But anyway, I manage to have my own Tosakin babies! But I do not update on the babies for now. What I would like to update was my project to create better red color in the Tosakin. As you see, they are all orange in color.

As I mentioned before in another post, I had a very strong red color in a red and white male butterfly goldfish. I called him Beni. He died already. But I managed to cross him with tosakin. Of course I do not get tosakin tail-shape right away. The tail is between tosakin and butterfly. I saved only the fish with the best red color. And this guy is the champion:

He has split tail. Sometimes he shows small flips, but mostly he doesn’t. I am very eager to mate him with those female tosakins as soon as possible.

I have several different color in red spectrum in his siblings. But he is the most red. The picture below highlight how red he is compared to the tosakin. And this is the end of my diary today. Wish me success in creating a decent deep-red tosakin in the near future!