Pairing with a blue

I have 6 blue angels, about half are veil tail. Two paired up, the other 4 seem to be ordered about by a male but none of the others seem to be paired and I am wondering if I have 4 males. If that is the case, is there anything that would make an interesting pairing with a blue and produce some nice offspring?

Because blue is recessive, unless you breed to another blue, or at least a fish with one Philippine blue gene, you won't see any sign of it in the next generation. However if you pair two siblings together you'll get 25% blues, or 50% if bred to a blue fish.

So anything else with recessive genes paired to the blue will end up wild type?

It obviously depends what other recessive genes are present in either or both fish. Blue varieties, in particular, will often have other genes lurking. This is partly because many of the blues available in the UK have some connection to the original Ken Kennedy stock imported in 2010. Those fish had, dark, gold, stripeless, Zebra, smokey, albino & pearlscale in their parentage. Because blue is a comparatively new variety even those fish with no direct connection to Ken's fish tend to have other genes present, simply because breeders are crossing different varieties to get to the blue varieties they want.

At the end of the day, crossing a blue with any unrelated fish, should give you nice, strong offspring which are het. for pb (have one copy of the Philippine blue gene) and will make good crosses to your other blues.

In my breeding efforts, I often mate two fish to give me an intermediate fish on the road to a particular variety. Often I find that I prefer some of the "incidental" varieties produced as a by product of my quest to produce a particular variety over the fish I was working towards!