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 Page 2 of 2

Guppy: the Genealogy Table of the guppy strains

RUBRIEK: Guppy Kweek         English Translation

The guppy is an aquarium fish that has been bred for more than 100 years. But only the last 40 years have been well documented. That has its rea-sons. The first is an obvious one: the first books and magazines were main-ly provided with drawnings and colored prints; then followed by white-black photos. Those lasts did not do justice to the color splendor of the millionfish . The first color photos were also rather coarse in shades, so that it was actually mainly photography enthusiasts who could capture beautiful snapshots in color with good cameras. It took until the invention of digital photography, before "normal" photos of swimming guppies could be taken in their full splendor. And then again, those who have tried that know how difficult it still is. It is precisely at the time of printing that they rotate or swivel, so that they are taken rarely beautiful or complete. 

Precisely for these reasons, in my youth I made drawings with colored pen-cils of the guppies I had bred. A monk-work that required a lot of patience and attention, but which provided me with documentation material that is unique and accurate to this day. All in all, the guppy strains of the first hour are known only from descriptions, or aproximative and often rudi-mentary sketches. The specimens of that time that were put in "strong water" have discolored over the years, and therefore do not give a good impression of the real colors of the time. The same applies to color photos taken of (freshly dead) fish or fish "on dry land": black, yellow and red dominate, while the iridescent colors blue and green largely "disappear". So they never "look" like a living and moving gup in water. 

The actual genetics research on the guppy largely took place in these early years. At the same time, it was also the beginning of the genetics, and in the guppy with its great variability it was found to be a good study object to mark certain physical characteristics on certain gene pairs. New studies of the guppy are more concerned with how the phenotype of a population adapts to ecological reality: for example, the impact of predatory fish on the color of the males. The "science" has therefore not really studied the genetics of the gup strains that were subsequently bred by the breeders later. 

And here is exactly arising an important problem : one continues with the mechanism to attribute each newly obtained form to a new gene, further mentioning that this probably or in most cases Y-bound, but not always. That is actually meaningless, because I have already noted in previous articles that gup females can be distinguished by their caudal fin shape and color, so that there is more a question of a blockage by the X chromosome of the colors on the body. The fact that the few most beautiful females I have grown in my career turned out to be sterile (due to a hormone dis-ruption) confirms this.