Gold Marble Angelfish

Gold Marble, first appeared in the late 1970's or early 1980's. They can be destingished from normal marble angels as follows...
1. Gold marbles have an underlying gold colouration, although this can tend to silver lower down the body.
2. The dark pigment on gold marbles is usually less extensive than on normal marbles. The dark pigmentation is always black rather than varying shades of grey as seen in normal marbles.
3. Gold marble angels are unable to fade their dark colouration with mood. Marble angels can often fade some of their colouration depending on mood.
4. Gold marble angels rarely have red eyes, if they do it is usually in association with a patch of black colouration.

When combined with homozygous stripeless genes the blushing gold marble is commonly known as a Koi angel. The key factors to destinguish a koi from a gold marble are as follows...
1. When young, Koi angelfish have translucent gill covers which allow the charicteristic "blushing" from the red gills underneath.
2. Gold marbles have horizontal striations in their dorsal fin. These are not usually seen in koi angelfish.
3. Koi angelfish have the charicteristic mother of pearl appearance of typical blushing fish.

Unlike the gold gene, gold marble is considered dominant, as a gold marble crossed with a silver wildtype fish produces a lightly marbled fish with complete, or near complete, vertical banding, these are sometimes refered to as "white marbles", whilst blushing "white marbles" are often refered to as "Blue Koi"

Along with Dark, Gold Marble (Gm) is an alelle of Marble (M) and Gold (g), this can complicate identification, the following marble combinations are possible (+ indicates wild type)

Gm/g - a lightly marbled gold marble
Gm/Gm - a more heavily marbled gold marble
M/+ - a lightly marbled marble.
M/M - a heavily marbled fish, often with very little silver showing.
M/g - very similar to a homozygous gold marble.
M/Gm - very difficult to destinguish from a M/g but more heavily marbled than a Gm/Gm.
Gm/+ - a very lightly marbled fish with clear vertical banding, which fade in and out depending on mood.

Throw in the complications that the fish might be either blushing (two stripeless genes), ghost (1 stripeless gene), clown (1 stripeless & 1 zebra gene) and often the only sure way to tell which genes a particular fish is carrying is to carry out test crosses.