Crowntail Doubletail (CTDT) Project Goals

Photo and betta by Sarawut Angkunanuwat, from his website gallery (http://www.siamimbellis.com/). One of the first beautiful CTDTs I ever saw...

The fullness and strength of the doubletail combined with the agility and wild grace of the crowntail...I was hooked on trying to create my own CTDT after seeing this guy in action.

Inspiration comes in funny places...

I think it is ALWAYS important to have goals when starting a breeding project. Having concrete goals allows you to create a definite plan of attack that breaks everything up into smaller, more manageable steps. 

I decided to try creating a line of crowntail doubletails (CTDTs) after a late night wrestling with a particularly foul take-home graduate school Genetics final. I was finishing up the section of Danio genetics, when I decided to heck with the complicated laboratory models and zinc finger nucleases, let's go back to something a little more Mendelian and a lot more aesthetically pleasing. Here was the result: 

All this at around 3 am in the morning...if only I was as productive on my genetics final that night...

So, as you can see, I managed to somehow convince myself that making a CTDT would only take 3 or 4 crosses, and that it was simple enough that it couldn't hurt to try. 

Now, a year later, I realize how naive I was to believe that this would be "easy". I did manage to breed my first CTDT in my latest spawn (still too small to take photographs of quite yet...) but it will require a LOT of work to even come close to my two main inspirations at the top of this page. It's been a really fun exercise in simple Mendelian genetics, though, and I've had some great crowntails come out of this project.

Every spawn is an exciting wait for what will develop. The anticipation for each cross and the drawn-out gratification are immensely satisfying to me. It's home grown science without the funding and grant writing pressure! And beautiful bettas to boot :)

Update March 14 2014: I will be dropping this project in favor of some lines I brought back from Europe, and also to concentrate on my red/yellow traditional plakats. It was a very interesting project with some nice fish, and I am happy that I was able to achieve my initial goals so quickly.