Is this the guppy of the future?

Santa Guppy (sold as a Red Coral Guppy)

Benjamin Bolival wrote to tell me Yoshiki Tsutsui's site has finally blinked out. It was in Japanese, but it showed pictures of the strains he created and the experiments he was conducting when he suddenly died of a brain aneurism at the age of 43 earlier this decade. I consider him a modern guppy master, perhaps the greatest guppy hobbyist of all time. It is so sad to see his site go out like a bulb on the Christmas tree.

Benjamin also told me of the demise of the Guppylabs site. Those of you who follow the inconsequential politics of the guppy scene will know that the owner of the site was a vehement critic of my work. I feel no joy in the passing of his site. It contained some very useful information, like the only English language interview with Tsutsui and Noboru Iwasaki, another great Japanese breeder. I would gladly host his library of information for free, but I am sure I am the last person on earth he would give permission to do so.

Is the "fancy guppy" hobby in decline? In North America the organized form of the hobby, IFGA, is said to have shrunk to 140 members. I do not know if that figure is accurate, but several years ago I attended the annual convention in Los Angeles and was shocked to see how few people were in attendance. More importantly the attendees were largely people in their retirement years. The oldest person in the room was 40.  The organization is resorting to doing Google ads to try to attract new members.Their conformance standard produces a guppy that is beautiful in its own right, although the Internet and the importation of European and Asian guppy strains have made it increasing irrelevant to youth under the aesthetic influence of a diverse, polyglot global culture.

There is an alternative to the IFGA and its elderly judging standard. It is called the International Guppy Education and Exhibition Society, or IGEES. I was a founding member. It was formed on the ideals of an Internet-based guppy association promoting the sharing of guppy knowledge and the celebration of the guppy's diversity through contests that reward creativity and release the guppy from its conformance judging straight jacket. But the IGEES has yet to gain traction, despite the best efforts of the two guys carrying the ball for it, Andrew Lim and Bill Gill.

I asked Cathy, owner of the largest aquarium superstore in the Greater Vancouver area what her sales have been recently. She says they have been slowing declining. Is the fish hobby drying up?

I do believe it has shrunk and will continue to shrink. I have had many discussions with Bill Gill about this and he still holds out hope that local guppy clubs will survive the current economic malaise. But I think the golden years of the fancy guppy hobby have passed because of cultural changes. The owner of a small aquarium shop whose business has shrunk to a small shadow of what it was in the 70s and 80s (of the last century!) blames it on the computer. According to her logic, the kids are too distracted by the Internet, computer gaming and social networking. I think she is largely right. The guppy hobby will never be what it was back in the last century.

This has happened to other cultural activities in the past. Plays were once a major form of public entertainment. They were eclipsed by radio. And radio in turn was eclipsed by television. Now the computer-based entertainment has shrunk television audiences. But people still go to plays. The audience is tiny but theater companies have found a way of surviving in a highly fragmented cultural context. People still listen to the radio. Almost all the radio plays in the U.S. are rebroadcast from previous decades. But the BBC in England still produces some radio plays. The audiences are a tiny fraction of those that once made radio plays a leading form of international entertainment.

The guppy hobby is already very much a fringe hobby. I was reminded of how tiny it was this past weekend. I was at a cultural crawl this weekend that is held annually in Vancouver. There were thousands of people wandering through artists studios gawking at the painted and collaged works. It made me pause and think what the form of the guppy hobby would be in the future, long after my DNA has degraded to earthly elements.

Then I came across the guppy shown at the top of this article. I was in an aquarium superstore so it qualifies for the moniker "pet store guppy," a term show guppy breeders use to separate themselves from the masses. I think it is beautiful in its own right. And I wonder what will happen when the last meeting of the IFGA or the IKGH is held, a handful of old men with wisps of white hair reminiscing about the guppy golden age when they were young lions.

People don't rely on horses for transportation anymore, at least not in the developed world. But there are still horse farms and there are individuals who own horses. So there are always going to be people who get caught up in the beauty and genetic mysteries of the guppy. They will have to share their passion via the Internet or mobile computing. But there will always be a fancy guppy hobby I think. The Guppy Designer facebook page has over 720 members that continue to grow slowly and steady over time. Only about 5% of them are geriatric, pointing guppies with a cane. The majority of them are in their 20s and 30s. That is a good sign. They are perhaps the new generation of fancy guppy hobbyists who will use social networking tools to invent a new form of the hobby. They will have also benefit from the fact genetics is going through a tremendous and exciting era of change. I think the guppy breeder of tomorrow will not find the genetics I write about half as hard to understand as current breeders. I think this is the future audience for my books.

I worry that many of the mutations that have been preserved by hobbyists, like the Schimmelpfennig, Stoerzbach or Pink mutations will be lost, if not in the literal sense, but at least become unrecognized and misunderstood. Or strains will fall into obscurity like the Pied Blue guppy which appeared and disappeared in Japan only to spring out of a crossing experiment I recently performed. But the pet store guppy at the top of this page gives me hope that there will always be a new starting point for somebody who has become hopelessly fascinated by this most diverse and polymorphic (meaning "assuming many forms") fish. I brought the guppy home. It was sold as a "Red Coral" guppy but I think I remember seeing it as a "Santa" guppy because of its white  and red colors. There was one male in the tank with a half-black pattern...so I think I know what its genetics might be. It probably contains genes that I already have in my fish room.

One of the studies I have made is of the Tsutsui Galaxy. Recently I sent my study of this strain to Dr. Richard Squire, because he is interested in guppy genetics. (He is a retired genetics professor.) He was very complimentary on the study and suggested I submit it to a scientific journal for publication. It was accepted by a journal and will appear in the next month. This means that the information on the creation of the Galaxy by Tsutsui and the information I have generated from my two year quest to recreate the Tsutsui Galaxy from the Schimmelpfennig Platinum and Lace Snakeskin will be preserved in the scientific record permanently. Some guppy hobbyist 1 or 100 years from now, struck by the strange markings on a pet store guppy will find it, read it and be able to ponder over what I have discovered, just as I have pondered over the guppy writings of Winge, Goodrich or Nayudu. I am not saying my work belongs at the same level as these accomplished scientists, but at least I will have preserved in pictures and text something of the genetics of one of the greatest guppy creations of the twentieth century.

I have tried to print the books as cheaply as I can to get as many of them out there as possible in the hopes some might survive over time and pass on the knowledge to another generation. Certainly there are no guppy organizations that have passed their knowledge on in a permanent form...most of them do not even publish newsletters on paper anymore, using electronic distribution instead. And I say with no false modesty that my books contain a huge wealth and depth of information found nowhere else.

In the next few days I am going to put my current books on sale to help put them into as many hands as possible. (It is the first sale of my books in two or three years.) And I am going to launch my new book in a month or so with an innovative internet webinar (a seminar using web technologies). And I am still thinking about ideas for webinars conducted with audio and pictures among small groups. (What do you think?) So I am going to stay fully committed to passing on what I have learned about guppy genetics to the next and subsequent generations. I have put a huge amount of work into this and can never really abandon it. But I plan to spend less time on the guppy hobby and more time in the much large art community. (I have taken up drawing and soon painting as a hobby...)

I would like to know what you think. Please offer your comments on the comment form below or on the Guppy Designer facebook page.

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