Hey! Remember how I said I was taking a break from Creatures? Well, that’s true, but I was serious when I said I wanted to get articles and updates out about other sim games, like one of my favorites, Aquazone. Don’t expect regular updates about this game, however as I intend to play this game at the “realistic” pace that was intended for it. I’ll be doing some FisherMan wizardry at the very start, but after that, it’s all about doing things the slow, steady way.

By the way, for anyone curious where I learned most of my Aquazone knowledge, check out these sites. They’ve all been invaluable in helping me grasp a lot of the care and genetics behind these fish.

Don’s Attic
AZ Genetics
Effenwright’s Aquazone ArtifactsCaryn’s Aquazone Ocean

bandicam 2015-05-26 15-38-20-918To start off, I have a goal in mind. I’m going to breed discus. I don’t know how many fish I’ll be keeping in this tank to breed my discus in, but I need to set up and cycle my tank before I can do anything else anyway.

The (mostly) empty tank you see on the left is my tank. It has some gravel and the “Bogwood” accessory added to it. I’ll be adding plants in a bit, before I can do that, I need to adjust the volume of the tank. After closing the tank and opening it up with FisherMan, I adjusted the tank’s volume from a lousy 12 liters up to an impressive 200. For those of you less metrically-minded, that’s just a little less than 53 gallons. That’s not as big as you think when you consider that many aquarium hobbyists have a 55 gallon tank at home, myself included.

Once that’s done, I open the tank again and set the simulation time to 100x the regular speed. Supposedly, this helps cycle the tank. Normally, I skip this step, but since I had other things to do and had to kill a few hours anyway, I decided to try this to see if it made a difference. I doubt it will.

bandicam 2015-05-26 19-49-21-091Once that was all taken care of, I added my plants. In general, I like to have a few taller plants to “break line of sight” for aggressive fish and I like to have low plants to give fish someplace to spawn.

The light I had set up automatically shut off but I still wanted to get my fish in the water before I closed this entry. Naturally, I decided to choose some discus. Rather than set any particular goal, I wanted to breed two discus together and see what strain I could develop from them. Let’s meet our fish.

fishiesI took two discus from the original files. The female is black with a blue halo and the male almost looks more like a butterfly fish with his yellow body. I’m excited to see what kinds of babies I can get here! I was tempted to try adding a “white based” fish because I’d spliced some together earlier today, but playing with some of the original fish seemed more fitting to me for some reason. It’ll take a lot of time, especially since I aged them down to their juvenile state, but let’s see what we can make!

  • Share on Tumblr
  •  

As I stated in the last entry, I would take the first good male and breed him with his sisters. When the male we chose mated, this is the offspring he produced in his first batch.

bandicam 2015-03-09 18-35-59-669 copyHere, we only have two males that seem to fit. They’ll have to do. Really, I’m just glad we got any. It seems to me, it’s rare to get a great batch in just the 3rd generation.

bandicam 2015-03-09 22-21-11-688 copyThis doesn’t look great. Of all 11 offspring, only Male 2 fits my ideal. I do want to point out that Males6, 3 and 9 are all sporting a tail pattern called “Grass”. Those would be called “grass red tailed guppies”.

And just then, my tanks kept crashing when I would try to advance time. After a quick reinstall, the problem still wasn’t resolved.

  • Share on Tumblr
  •  

Untitled-1 copyYou bet! If you come here for my regular Creatures blogging, you might be disappointed (or excited!) to hear that I’d like to turn this into something of an Aquazone week. I just got really excited about the game again after playing El-Fish.

This time, I’d like to try to make my old goal of creating a homozygous strain of red tail guppies. It’s a good first goal and one I’ll try to make without the aid of gene splicing. I’ll be using the pair above and, to see if I can get things started right, I’ll be choosing the best daughter and son that they can produce to be the base for the subsequent generations. Easier to start a homozygous strain if you can start with a pair with more similar genes, right? Besides, all the early generation variations are fun to look at.

By the way, I’ll be using Don’s chart (archive.org) as a guide for naming the patterns and colors I see in my guppy series. If you’d like to try this game for yourself, why not secure a copy from Amazon? I got mine for less than 2USD.

bandicam 2015-03-07 21-55-28-623Generation 1 Males

After giving these two about 3 months time (changing the date on my computer) I got these three males and a lot of females. Of course, as much as I love the color in Males 1 and 2, I was going for a color more like Male 3’s and had to find a female who would produce similar colors. Stabilizing the gene pool meant making the genes more and more homozygous by breeding out variation – not something I’m used to in my dealings with Creatures. This meant testing each female with Male 3 to see what they could produce since the females themselves didn’t have an easy way to tell their genotypes. I stored Males1 and 2. If I really wanted, I could try to create a strain from them later.

bandicam 2015-03-07 22-07-04-049 copyGen2 Males From Female 1

These are the males that Female 1 produced with Male 3. Two for three. Not bad. I’ll have to remember her as a potential candidate. Only male 3 is disqualified for his dark red color. Granted, this is a very small sample

bandicam 2015-03-07 22-25-21-047Gen2 Males From Female 2

These are the males that Female 2 produced with Male 3. At first, it looks like she produced two good males, but if you look closely, males 3 and 4 both have an extra, blueish color at the base of their fins aren’t quite the right color anyway. This is the faint version of the “multi” gene described in the chart I’ve linked to above. This is definitely not a feature I’m looking for in my clear, red tailed Guppies. I’ll pass on this female for now. I think male 1 looks gorgeous, by the way.

 bandicam 2015-03-07 22-40-48-844Gen2 Males From Female 3

Wow! 6 males this time! Unfortunately, only Male 3 seems to fit the criteria I’ve set up. Males 2 and 5 are the wrong color entirely, Males 1 and 5 are too bright and male 6 is both too light and has the second shade at the base of his top fin. For now, though, I’m just trying to get regular shades of red with no secondary fin colors or markings. I’ll not be using this female

yayGen2 Males From Female 4

Still not great! Now, we have 3 very dark males and 1 male who is too light! That said, Males 1 and 5 are precisely what I’m looking for. I also happen to like the colors of the darker males, particularly 4, but just as before, they’ll have to be put away for now. Female 4 can be stored with the other potential females.

F5Gen2 Males From Female 5

This is better. Here we have 2 males that are very close to my target color, one who is just a touch on the vibrant side, one who is entirely too dark and one who is much too light and has that blue fade. Still 2 out of five isn’t bad. I’ll be keeping this female.

F6Gen2 Males From Female 6

At a glance, this looks better, but you’ll notice that three males have that small blue fade. Really, one 1 male in this group fits the criteria and that is Male 1. Sadly, Female 6 will not be our founding mother.

bandicam 2015-03-08 00-05-50-845 copyThis left me with three potential starting mothers – Females 1, 4 and 5. Given the small sample sizes of the offspring, it was really anybody’s guess who would be good but the lack of unexpected and unusual colors in his brothers eventually led me to choose Male 3 from Female 5’s line. Having only 3 sisters meant more work for me if they weren’t close to being homozygous, but I like to think my efforts tonight made that less likely. At any rate, I’ve gotten into the swing of things and am ready to start the next Generation.

  • Share on Tumblr
  •  

Our seven babies have graduated to the point now where they swim up to the food and eat it themselves! It means feeding them a lot more but this is still a huge step up from before. They’re still under the watchful eyes of their parents but that’s just mom and dad doing their job.

bandicam 2013-07-27 23-34-48-902Here’s hoping that someday soon, we’ll get a glean into discus genetics again.

  • Share on Tumblr
  •