Lemon oscar

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  Tiger

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  Red

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  Albino

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  LemonThis page

Care at a glance

Overview

Lemon is the yellow oscar: lemon to mustard coloring over a cream-white body, with much less of the orange-red pattern than a standard albino shows. Tone varies between suppliers, and some shops use lemon and albino for the same fish, so look at the fish rather than the tag. It turns up in fewer stores than the plain albino.

In the wild

Lemon oscars are a pale selection out of albino stock held by ornamental farms, and nothing in the wild looks like one. No source names the breeder, the country or the decade, so this is a hobby line of uncertain origin. Retailers list it as tank-bred alongside the other pale forms.

Good to know

The yellow look comes from dark pigment being cut back, leaving the yellow layer to carry the fish. The orange-red pattern is reduced too, so the yellow ground does most of the work. Pattern intensity is a graded trait, so lemon spawns come out uneven and get sorted by eye. Retailer and hobby pages split the name between a dark-eyed xanthic fish and a red-eyed albino one, so eye color is worth checking against the label.

Common questions

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