Is this the Most Unusual Guppy Mutation Ever?

Cool! This female made my day (I guess I have gotten old...)

The crosses I have performed with Midnight Blacks in the last year have been a disappointment. In the second generations of the crosses I did not get good results. I have tried to create a Midnight Leopard Moscow but the second generation produced no Leopards. I tried to create a Midnight Metal Head guppy but the second generation produced a poor excuse for a Metal Head. So as I told my good friend Bill Gill, I was going to do the crosses all over again with Blue Moscows.

Because I keep breeding records, and because I needed to at least document my failure, and BECAUSE I wanted to dump the failed drop, I took pictures of the Metal Head failure today. You can see the female in the picture at the top.

HOLY COW!!!!!!

Look at her. Is she odd or what. Look at the reticulation pattern. Kinda wonky don't you think? Don't see it? Here is a close up:

Wonky reticulation pattern.

To see just how wonky the pattern is, compare it to the pattern on a wild type female.

Notice how regular and perfect the diamond shaped reticulation pattern on a wild female is.

I checked the snakeskin mother line, and the females had a wild type reticulation pattern.

The wonky pattern on the F2 female is something I did not notice until I had her in the photography tank. Then I let out a whoop like someone who just found a nugget of gold in a murky, weed-infested stream. That's because I have been studying the reticulation pattern of the guppy while writing my new book (The Guppy Color Manual). I quickly switched my attention to the males.

F2 Midnight Black male X Lace Snakeskin Female

Very odd. I think the snakeskin pattern should be expressed in the fins and peduncle of this guppy, and the Blue Moscow in the front of the body, but the snakeskin pattern has been destroyed by the Midnight gene. Or rather you see the remnants of the snakeskin pattern in the goldish and whitish markings.

I would love to tell you why I think this is such a big find, but then it has taken me 185 pages in the Guppy Color Manual to explain the concept so I do not want to summarize it here and now. Let's just say that the reticulation pattern of the guppy is probably its most neglected feature in 100 years of study. And the reason why I felt like I had discovered a nugget of gold when I closely looked at my F2 females is that it provides powerful confirmation of the central thesis of the book.

Of course there is another very strange outcome I cannot account for. In both the female and male the dorsal fin is badly malformed. That has me completely stumped. But I will put it into the documentation I am keeping on my crosses. Maybe when I come to write about fin genetics it will be like a puzzle piece sitting on the side of the board waiting to find its place in the big picture.

The discovery of the effect of the Midnight gene on the snakeskin pattern is probably a good reason for NOT publishing the book now. I still have a dozen or so crosses to analyze, and like pieces in a puzzle, when I do fit them together, I might have a more complete "big picture" theory to tell.... But then, if that was true I would never sit down and write a single sentence. That is the pure fun of freely exploring the interactions of color genes in the guppy. Maybe I will never get to a complete puzzle picture, nicely done. Perhaps I wish I never will.

This has been another case of a seemingly bad cross that has yielded up gold. I came so close to abandoning this cross, a cross in retrospect which is the most important one I have done in two years. Not even the Galaxy quest was important as this big fat nugget...