This female swordtail has an ultra-long dorsal fin. These fish are not prolific breeders and this female's first brood contained less than 20 babies.

These lyretails have an unusual caudal fin pigmentation pattern. In addition to the weakly pigmented black dorsal and caudal fins (wag pattern), they contain intense black pigmentation at the caudal peduncle. These fish are derived from X. birchmanni and may express modifiers that increase the expression of the moon (M) or the crescent complete (Cc) gene. However, siblings of these fish all have uniformally, intense black lyretails. It is therefore possible that this unusual pigment pattern is due to an uncharacterized wag (CoE) variation that limits the spread of melanocytes from the caudal peduncle.

These X. montezuma-helleri hybrids have well-developed hifins.

These colorful lyretails resulted from crosses between two different green tuxedo lyretail males and a yellow wag female. The "male" (left) and female (center) are siblings and contain more yellow pigmentation than the female on right. While they all express the wag pattern (CoE), the lyretail of the female on the right exhibits very intense black pigmentation.