How to Get the Most Out of Your Crosses

Pink Guppy

Yesterday I sat down to write about a cross I did between a Metal Magenta Moscow (I call the Silverado) and a Full Red female. The cross has been going on for seven months but I really did not see what I had got from the cross until yesterday.

Oh, I did spend lots of time in the fish room peering into the tanks. But I had to photograph the guppies and write about them to truly see them. For instance, I did not realize until I photographed the male you see in the above picture that he was a Pink Guppy. That was what I was trying to create with the cross. I wanted to find out if the Asian Pink Guppy was composed of the magenta and full red genes. This male confirmed that. He is going to be a beautiful specimen when he grows up.

He is only a couple of months old so I suppose he would have shown his true colors when he got older, but putting him up on my computer screen and really looking at him...I mean really looking at him...and engaging my brain while doing so revealed his status. Another confirmed genotype for my Guppy Color Strains book library.

I have heard it said that the only way to study a painting in a gallery or a museum is to tuck a chair under your bum. You cannot possibly fully comprehend a work of art standing on your legs, walking from one painting to the next. You need time to become fully engaged. And you have to activate the thinking part of your brain.

It was because I wrote about the cross in my breeding journal (I call Design Lab) that I discovered that the Santa guppy is basically a Pink Guppy with a metal gene. As it turns out a Santa Guppy was also a product of the cross.

Santa Guppy

A Santa Guppy has a white metal body and magenta red fins. It also has the blond gene. The difference between a Pink Guppy and a Santa Guppy is the additional presence of the blond and metal genes in the Santa Guppy. That was an unexpected connection that fell out of my work on the breeding journal. Would I have made the mental connection standing on my two feet in the fish room? Maybe. That would be leaving it to chance.

Now you can see why someone staring into their tanks for 40 years might not know so much. Systematically exploring crosses, taking pictures, and writing about those crosses in a breeding journal will teach you more about guppy genetics in two years than a couple of lifetimes peering into tanks.

The Santa Guppy shown above has a distinct tangerine color to it. I was tempted to call it a "Tangerine Guppy" which my friend Junichi Ito has named. I will wait until it gets older.

Farmers grow crops in fields and harvest them at the end of the growing season. When I fish my guppies from their tanks, photograph them and then write about  them it always feels like harvesting.

Here is another mental harvest from this one cross.

Blue Phenotype

The blue phenotype you see above also segregated out of the cross. I was in the process of writing about this guppy in my breeding journal when I suddenly realized that I was seeing something I had seen before. This cross produced a very similar range of phenotypes to other crosses I have made. A pattern had emerged. Suddenly I understood for the first time the puzzling crosses I have made with my Silverados. Try as I might in the past I was not able to account for the phenotypes I got from Silverado crosses. A single, simple and patchwork F1 phenotype. Then a plethora of phenotypes segregating out in the F2. Now I had the data, the pictures and the mental connections to figure the puzzle out.

Obviously there is a great deal of consistency in the interactions of the constituent genes. Once more guppy genetics has proven to be a lot more predictable and consistent than I had imagined. This was a devilishly difficult gene combination to decipher. And after six years there it was in all its original simplicity. I will publish my full study of the cross on the books mailing list for those who are interested.

One simple cross with a simple goal: to determine the genotype of the Pink Guppy. But a cornucopia of insights into the interactions of the magenta, Moscow, metal and Full Red genes.  I really don't think I could have figured this out standing on my feet. You have to harvest insights into guppy genetics sitting down with your finger tips dancing across the computer keys.

If you find writing a blog or a journal entry too difficult, try sitting down and writing a long forum message. Try to describe the cross with pictures and then analyze the cross. The benefit of this approach is that others may comment on your cross which will often help you achieve useful insights.

Come on. You put a lot of thought into the cross. And then you spent months feeding and cleaning the tanks. Is not all that work worth a few hours of picture taking and writing? Sit down you bum and start writing!