A breakthrough! And it only took three and a half weeks. My fry are finally eating gel food.

This is the batch of about 50 fry that were the younger set when the oven accident occured. Regretfully, none of the older ones survived that. These are now just over a month old, and have been eating the gelfood for about a week and a half now.

It is soo cool to see this cube of food thats "grown" about 30 tails. Everyone seems to like this. It is also a relief to not have to worry about being home every 3-4 hours to feed the little guys. Now I can drop in cubes 2-3 times a day and they can continously feed as they get hungry.

The breakthrough happened one night I decided to just drop a small pellet of progold into their tub. At first they ignored it totally. But I guess it smelled really good as it got softer, because within an hour the entire thing was gone! After that the fry readily ate off of food that was larger than they were.

Another benifit, they are growing a lot faster now that they eat almost continously throught the day. Some have very large tails for their body size, some have nice proportionate tails. I also have a nice mixture of normal eyes and black eyes. I am watching the black eyes for signs of crossbreeds between mommy Dee (pearscale) and Velvet (black moor) one of the two potential daddies. A few seem to be going white, which last year indicated early calico colorings. The rest are still a green/grey coloring...no darks or lights in that group yet.

Side question: is it "normal" for a fry that is now 8 1/2 months old to still be fry colored? Trying to figure out if he has yet to change or thats his "adult" coloring.

SOme lines of fish change earlier than others. Calicos tend to change earlier than solid red. Blues tend to come in late. In my blue Phoenix, they have waited until they are over 1 year old before changing to adult colors. Others, in one Ryukin line change at about 20 weeks. Still others change at 8 months of age. In all, the various colors within the spawn change at different times, too, with the blue/black being last, the calicos/whites being first.

The fry in question has one calico parent for sure. Due the the pearlscales, and roundness of its body I am assuming that dad is the other pearlie, which would give it two calico parents. However there is a chance that dad is a black moor. This still leaves me very confused about the potential coloring of offspring, if they are not calicos. I understand orange can be dominant, but thought that it was one of the earlier colors to show after the calicos.

So far the body and fins of the 8 month old fry are brownish grey at the top, fading to more of a white/grey towards his belly. His tail fin has taken a sorta redish brown tint over the past month, if you look at it under the right lighting conditions. Other than the tail, there has been 0 color change since he was 2 months old.