Female Rosy Barb (Puntius conchonius)

[fernfreak]

Either I'm misidentifying them, or all the LFS here are selling males only, if they are selling rosy barbs at all. The clearest marker for determining sex seems to be colour, with the females being silvery/greenish, while the males are reddish/gold/yellow.

I've been visiting shops all over the island over the past year, but none of them seem to sell any rosy barbs with the greenish-silver colouration. Some storekeepers say this is because it's hard to sell the females, which are less attractively coloured. Otherwise, could it be that the rosy barbs sold locally have females which are yellow and much harder to distinguish from males? If so, is there a better way to determine their sexes?

[stormhawk]

I've seen female Rosy Barbs for sale in tanks with mixed sexes locally. Last place I saw them was at Polyart but that was probably half a year ago. They are however, of the long-finned fancy variant. The shops are not wrong in saying that the females are harder to sell. However, the usual reason is that they don't want home breeders to breed these.

[fernfreak]

Thanks for the heads up-- I did see the longfins at Polyart last year, but I thought they were all male! They all seemed red/gold to me, rather than greenish/silver. Is there some other feature you used to tell them apart?

Out of curiosity, why would LFSes not want home breeders to breed specifically rosy barbs, while at the same time selling both sexes for many other species, which may also breed prolifically and be easier to differentiate?

[stormhawk]

The dorsal fin has a black mark in males, and very very slight at the edges only for females. Other than that, I don't use any other method to tell them apart. There is always one or two random females in bags of males. The farms occasionally do not bother with what they sell and sometimes the farm hands don't really check what they pack for sale. This is how you can find contaminants in some bags of wild or farm fish.

The reason is simple, they do not want the home breeder to make a profit from breeding these fishes for sale to other hobbyists. This affects their business too in a way. The other thing is, the popularity of some commonly found fish in the 80's and 90's has dropped. For example swordtails, tiger barbs, platies and even rosy barbs are becoming harder and harder to find locally, especially those without traits like long fins and such. Sometimes I wish I can still find a red tuxedo swordtail or a green wild-type swordtail. The current trend is to keep "special" fish, like Galaxy Danio or some other exotic species, so all these bread and butter fish from our childhood days are beginning to become even rarer.

But alas, many of these fish have turned into feeders. You can easily find juvenile Tiger Barbs for sale as feeder fish.