Female swordtail peculiarity, anyone notice this before?

[kevincanada]

I have been selectively breeding the late maturing and much larger swordtails. after a couple of years now  i notice that at full size, even the females have a tiny nub of a sword on the tail. perhaps the small ones at the pet stores have this feature too but we just dont notice it. just thought i'd share with the group. cheers from freezing ottawa!

[MattyM]

Beautiful fish! That color is 🙌

[PineSong]

Wow, that's super interesting. I just started breeding swordtails a few months ago so I will keep my eyes peeled for this kind of variation. Great color on your fish--and your male's sword is nice and dramatic. My first batch of offspring are just now starting to grow their swords. I only kept three males from that batch and they are all developing at a different pace.

[Patrick_G]

That’s interesting, I’d keep breeding that line if I were you. The color is incredible and the female’s little sword nub sounds really cool. 
 

On a side note, female Swords can transition to male if conditions are right so maybe your are primed for a change. 

[DaniV]

Absolutely gorgeous!  My 2 female swordtails don't have any signs of stubs, so maybe that's due to the breeding?  Keep it up~!

[kevincanada]

i got the idea to breed for large size from Cory's interview with greg sage. these males are almost 7 inches long with tail and the females are about 5 inches or so, i think. what i did was remove all the early sword bearing males. then the ones that i thought were female keep growing and then after several months start to show sword etc. not sure if they'd be viable commercially because of the long growout period and the giant size but i really like them and find them spectacular. thanks for all the kind comments. cheers.

[nabokovfan87]

The ones I have from @Minanora are similar.  The bottom fin tail ray is definitely pronounced.