I would like to be able to brag about my goldfish breeding abilities and that is how I was able to obtain some Blue Veiltails. However, it comes down to simple luck, as I had no intention on recreating a Blue Veiltail. I had heard for years from Gary Hater about his efforts to create and maintain a line of Blue Veiltails and the unfortunate loss of the line some years ago. With this in that back of my mind, I had two surprise fish that turned out to be blue when breeding my Philadelphia Veiltails. I will try to explain how these blue fish came about by accident. The female appeared in a cross of uncolored Veiltails that I had originally receive from Gary about 5 years ago. I suspect that these fish had blue somewhere in their background but I was unable to cross them directly because all 5 turned out to be male. However, through the years I have received other Veiltails from Gary and some ended up being female. Last year I had made 2 crosses, one with uncolored females from Gary and the 5 older males. I also crossed the females to what I consider to be my best fish which happens to be orange. This fish breeds so infrequently and when he does he hardly makes any sperm, so I kept a spawn with poor quality tails that I thought was from him. Well it turned out that poor quality fry came from the other spawn of the uncolored fish and I had mixed them up. Lucky I did though because this is where the female Blue Veiltail came from. I never would have kept her because of her tail if it wasn’t for the fact that I thought she came from the superior orange fish and I was desperate for a daughter to line breed him too.
The male Blue Veiltail came about through a cross between the same uncolored males and a cross to an albino telescope that I receive from Dandyorandas.com. I have been trying for 5 years to create a line of albino Veiltails and had made numerous crosses to get the albino into my veiltails. The offspring of these fish do not inherit anything near a Veiltail tail. However, any fish that are close I would keep knowing back breeding could improve the qualities of the tails more. Some of these albino outcross fish went through a weird color change and turned a steely white. I suspect it has something to do with de-melaninizing as one of my Blue Bubble Eyes has turned the same color. Regardless one of the fish never changed color and remained blue in color. His main flaw was that he had some forking in his tail but I kept him because I knew I could not ask for perfection when outcrossing to a telescope and I was going to back breed him to a Veiltail again anyway. Both of these fish where in the tank together last year when Gary came to my house for the Richmond Goldfish Show and he suggested that I breed them to see if I could get blue fish. Again I was lucky because the only two fish I had turned out to be male and female, and luckily she spawned when few of my veiltails did this year. The babies are outside in a 150 tub for the summer now, and I am really pleased with the blue especially with them being out in the sun. Two of them have turned brown (red circles in picture) which I was hoping to see, as Smart in his book says that Brown/Blue are controlled by a single gene.
Looking towards the future I am going to work on improving the tails and breeding some diversity into the line. I will back breed the babies I have this year to the 5 uncolored males to see if they carry the blue as I suspect and will breed them back to their parents to see if I can get some quality blue fish that way. I also have a female Brown Veiltail that is a cross between a Brown Chinese Veiltail and the uncolored males mention above. I am certain she will throw blue offspring and put some diversity into the line. Chris and Arielle in NC also have Blue Ryukins and Blue Orandas that will be useful as outcrosses to breed genetic structure into our Blue Veiltails.