New "Pied Blue" Guppy Strain

Pied Blue Guppy

One of the benefits of my ten year long campaign to decipher the genetics of common guppy strains is that I have stumbled upon new strains. Like the guppy you see above.

The guppy is a combination of the Stoerzbach Metal Sword and Lace Snakeskin strains. You can see the evidence of the Stoerzbach father in the shape of the dorsal and a hint of double swords in the caudal fin. The overall blue cast of the body is the expression of the autosomal recessive Stoerzbach gene, which gives the father line a solid blue body color. The snakeskin gene is expressed in the mottled dark blue / black pattern of the body and fins. It is also expressed in the overall yellow platinum color.

Interesting thing that: the platinum color emerging out of a snakeskin cross. It confirms what I speculated about in the Galaxy series of crosses. Yellow platinum is a key component of the snakeskin complex.

I have documented this new strain in the Design Lab book which is unpublished. The first generation of the cross produced beautiful swordtail snakeskins. This phenotype emerged in the second generation. The reason it did is because the Stoerzbach gene is autosomal recessive, so it would not influence the phenotype until the second generation. What is interesting is that the Stoerzbach gene, which affects the expression of the iridophores, has almost completely suppressed expression of the snakeskin gene.

My reason for doing the cross in the first place was to see if I could produce a Micariff by combining the Stoerzbach and snakeskin genes. Obviously the simple combination of these genes does not produce the Micariff phenotype. Ronan Boutot tells me that the half-black gene and perhaps red is necessary. That happens to chime with something I was told about the origins of the Micariff. It is supposed to have been created from a cross between a half-black red and a snakeskin strain. Perhaps the combination is Stoerzbach + snakeskin + red + half-black. I am going to try that combination.

I have actually seen a similar phenotype to this one before.

F2 Green Lace X Full Platinum

The guppy emerged from a cross between a Green Lace male and Full Platinum female. You can see in the dark pied markings the expression of the snakeskin gene and in the overall yellow platinum color the expression of the Full Platinum Mg (Metallic Gold) gene. The obvious difference between the two strains is the presence of blue metallic color in the Stoerzbach cross. I abandone the Green Lace X Full Platinum phenotype and have always regretted that as pied beauty is something I really love in animals.

Compare this guppy to a Micariff.

Micariff

The Micariff has a much smoother, shinier and metallic look compared to the two previous phenotypes. So the formula cannot be simply Stoerzbach + snakeskin.

I am going to continue to hunt down the genetic formula for a Micariff. But that leaves me with this interesting new phenotype. I really like it. I can see a potential for creating a swordtail strain from this male. I actually have a whole tank of them now and plan to continue their development. I have decided to call it the "Pied Blue Guppy" after Hopkin's poem ("Pied Beauty").

What is really interesting about this phenotype is that it mixes yellow platinum from the snakeskin side with blue from the Stoerzbach side, yet these two colors don't mix and become green. Normally that is how you produce a green guppy. Blue iridophores sit below a layer of yellow pigment cells. The yellow filters the blue to a green color. Why this is not happening in this case is a bit of a mystery. I have never seen this in guppies before. That in itself is a good reason for keeping this new strain.

Addendum

After writing this article I was going through some old images I collected ten years ago, and discovered one of the guppies I had found on another site looked almost identical to the Pied Blue guppy. (I cannot show the picture here because of its unknown origin and presumed copyright.) I believe it was from a Japanese web site.