DennisH

Those remind me of bantam Cubalayas. You should look into those, they are rare but several breeders keep them. The advantage of a known breed is that the babies are worth more and you have other breeders to work with, the internet makes that much easier. I have a friend on Ohio that keeps Cubalayas (bantam and large fowl) and swears they are the best chickens in the world. I mostly keep colored egg layers that lay dark brown, blue or dark green eggs. So many first time chicken keepers start up every year and they want a colorful collection of eggs to show off. I also breed for docility and longevity of laying, qualities that large hatcheries don't care about at all. Gives me a niche where I can change more than hatcheries and still make lots of sales, as people quickly figure out the cost of the chicks is just a tiny fraction of the overall cost of keeping chickens, so it makes sense to start with the best.

I'm out of the fish hobby for a while. I raise fancy poultry and sell chicks to backyard chicken keepers now. I found this thread when I was reminiscing and did a search. I hope you can get them to become sturdy fish, it eluded me, but they were among the last fish I got rid of, because I was hoping someone would continue the line. I think they may always be a specialty fish, only for really devoted hobbyists. I also did about 80% (or more) weekly water changes with soft well water. Perhaps they just have a lower tolerance for toxins than the short fin varieties. Long fin varieties of many fish often seem the most stressed and pathetic looking in the pet stores. I wish you the best succes possible with these!

Signing in here for the first time. I did this same cross about 20 years ago, when the golds were first available. Took a few years as it did for you, but eventually I had hundreds of pure breeding gold longfins. I sold some on Aquabid and also to locals in the fish clubs. I found out a couple of things that might interest you: Parents seem to eat the gold babies much faster than the normals. Found this to be true in short fins as well. I got best results in tanks choked with riccia, or else in planted tanks where I pulled the parents out when the first babies were sighted. The normal long fins would allow a significant number of babies to mature with them. There are 2 subspecies of white clouds, both were considered extinct in the wild 20 years ago, not sure if more have been found in the wild. The northern strain vanished first, and was replaced in the trade with the southern strain because it tolerated warm water (Florida fish farm ponds) better and also it had white/yellow tipping on the fins. The strains obviously interbreed, but if you find original photos from the wild, you can see that the northern strain had fins that were white or clear close to the body, with bright red toward the tips. The southern strain was the opposite, red near the body with white or yellow edging on the tips. I had both fin color variants in my gold longfins and rather liked that, but the ones that took after the northern strain had much more total red area on their fins and were real shop stoppers. My gold longfins seem to have accumulated some of the worse of both (highly inbred) strains. They really liked the unheated tanks in my unheated basement, where the temps varied between 60 and 72. But most everyone else that tried to breed them failed to even keep them alive. My water was also very soft and slightly acidic, maybe they liked that too. All I know is I could raise them by the hundreds, but others often could not. I once had a 55 with lots of live plants (riccia, java moss, java fern). There were easily hundreds in that tank of all sizes, all the time. I would just net out some to take to auctions and you could not tell I had removed any. I think some of their descendants might still be out there, I see them advertised on Aquabid every now and then. I really hope they did survive, I liked them.