This year, one of our later spawnings was Ochiba, you get Ochiba by crossing Chagoi with Kohaku.

For the last few years, we have used our reliable and very productive Ginrin Chagoi female, affectionately know as Mary. This year however, she wasn't quite right when it came to spawning time, and so we ended up using one of her offspring instead.

A lovely Ginrin pale Hachimitsu (honey coloured) female, and crossed her with a Momotaro Kohaku male (not ginrin). The interesting thing about this cross is that we got hardly any dark Chagoi, which is great, and that in addition to lots of beautiful pale Chagoi, we also got lots of delicately pale Ochiba and some more rust coloured ones too.

I am really intrigued by the rust coloured chagoi (for want of a better description!) but to show you what I mean, here are a few pictures.

Here's one against a regular pale Ochiba with a Ginrin Hachimitsu Chagoi and a rust coloured chagoi in the background.

You may be forgiven for thinking that they are a bit too much like Kohaku, so for comparison, here are a couple of Kohaku from one of our Sanke spawnings.

As you can see, they are quite different. When we cross Chagoi with Kohaku, you don't normally get anything that resembles hi because the Chagoi genes are much stronger than the Kohaku. Instead, what you get is the shiro from the Kohaku emerging as grey and the Chagoi brown presenting as an almost Kohaku like pattern. The reason, I think that we are seeing much more of the influence of the Kohaku in this spawning is that the Chagoi father of the female that we used for this spawning was in fact from a Chagoi cross Ochiba spawning himself. Hope that makes sense!

Anyway, this is a really unusual outcome and these Ochiba and Chagoi are truly beautiful. I am really looking forward to seeing them develop over the next few months and years.

Lisa