Ive had this guy for about 8 months and he has always looked like this in my tank, but he didn't look like this when i bought him. Any idea what is going on? He is a normal healthy otto other than his color
I can't imagine a disease that would cause this. It would be nice if you could breed him and see if it's genetic. I bet people would go crazy for white otos.
I suspect he had a stress-triggered hypomelanism rather than true leucism. I've heard of it happening in birds, but I haven't read any scientific journals on it happening with fish--but it sounds exactly like what happened to your oto.
He may or may not have a genetic predisposition to cause it to trigger with stress.
I would imagine it's permanent. With birds, sometimes it's permanent and other times it goes away as they lose the stress and molt--they regrow feathers of their original color. My suspicion is that if he's been like this for 8 months that he's going to stay white.
I'm not sure it's permanent - I've had one or two ottos do this before too when they were stressed (too cold, in my case). They turned back after a few days....
8 months is a long time though.
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