It doesn't have the thick scales of a dragon and in real life doesn't look especially metallic. When the light hits it at the right angle the colour seems more intense than a regular royal blue. The copper female isn't dragon either. Well I don't think it's thick enough to be called dragon. Her colour seems paler than normal coppers I think that could be the lack or reduction of some of the other colours. Maybe she doesn't have as much red, blue or black and that's affecting the copper. She's a tad larger than the males. Hopefully that won't be too much of a problem.
I have basically divided them into a solid group and a butterfly group. I'm going to attempt to get one spawn from each group to start off with. I have a little problem in that I'm going to be away for a week at Christmas and will need my fish looked after. Any fry will need to be past the brine shrimp stage to make them easier to feed. If it's only a matter of chucking some pellets and/or frozen food into the fry tank I could even get my mother to look after them for a week. But she wouldn't do the bbs thing.
So what I'm going to do is prepare all of them to spawn but only release 2 pairs at a time. As soon as one pair from each group spawns I'll stop teasing the rest. But really, the spawns have to happen no later than next weekend which is kind of a big ask for fish that have been in transit for 2 days. I'm counting on Fishchick's excellent care during quarantine. The pairs are in neighbouring tanks and I couldn't resist uncarding them a little bit yesterday. (I know, I know the Cruelty Kids are going to come after me.) All of them, without exception, reacted to each other. So I'm hopeful but we'll just have to see what happens. I might just have to try again after Christmas.