Vieja marble fenestratus is not a hybrid

Vieja marble fenestratus is NOT a hybrid!

A Pure Vieja group was recently formed, and a lot of people have been asking whether marble and spotted ones can be posted in it. First, the reason this Pure Vieja group exists is because the long-standing Vieja group has been hosting posts of hybrid Viejas — fish in the same genus cross-breed very easily if kept together. In fact, Vieja’s cross-species hybridization ability is exactly the recipe for creating flowerhorn cichlids.

In short: there’s a guy living in Brisbane (UK) who kept Vieja fenestratus and one of the offspring came out “marble”. He went on breeding that fish and distributing it. You could call Stephen Zillmann the father of the Vieja fenestratus “marble”.

My take: it’s still not a fish “harvested” from the wild, but it is an acceptable mutation. You can understand it this way — in the wild, it’s possible for a marble specimen to be born, but it would be at a disadvantage in camouflage or would be pushed out of the group (similar to albinos), so it can’t develop into a natural variant.