A Winning Strategy for the Guppy Game
Glass Belly Full Red
Shown above is my new Glass Belly Full Red strain. It is descended from a Chiasson Full Red male crossed to a See-thru female.
My design goal was to produce a full red guppy that had blood red areas where the glass belly gene removed silver iridophores, particularly around the belly and gills. If you look at the these areas you will see that the silver iridophores (silver light reflecting color cells) are missing. The eyes are black because the silver iridophores are missing. Compare this male to a Chiasson Full Red male.
Chiasson Full Red male
I consider the attempt to create a "super" Full Red a failure. Aesthetically that is. I don't see the new strain as a big improvement over the older strain and the cross did not work out the way I imagined.
I wonder how many guppy breeders would abandon the cross at this point? You often hear breeders talk about failed crosses they have culled. The gamble they invested in did not pay off. They walk away with empty pockets.
Obviously my prediction that I would get a intense red guppy did not work out. I have back crossed this male to a Chiasson Full Red female to see if I can get a deeper and richer red, but I already know that it is not going to happen.
I am working on the Color Manual book right now and the reason why my new strain actually lost the depth and opacity of red is right there in the book. It comes from reading Dr. Joseph Bagnara, the American reptile and frog color cell pigment specialist. (Bagnara is absolutely required reading for anybody who is interested in guppy color.) He tells us that the brilliant colors on poikilothermic animals (cold blooded animals like fish) comes from a biological partnership between the iridophores and the pigment color cells, usually yellow and red. Since the iridophores sit under the red colors in the skin, they act like reflective surface you see in the heads of flashlights. And the red and yellow color cells act like colored gells. So bright red on guppies requires the presence of a layer of iridophores under the red color cells.
That is exactly what you see in the Chiasson Full Red male and that is exactly what you DON'T see in the case of the Glass Belly Full Red male. This failed cross has turned out to be an excellent confirmation of Bagnara's observation about the bright colors of poikilotherms. The iridophores make the color more opaque, they make it shiny and they give the red color its actual tone. Just look at the difference in red color tone between the two reds shown above. Obviously the difference you see in the quality of red from one strain to the next is not due entirely to the red gene or genes, it is also due to the color of the light reflected by the underlying iridophores. A Full Red guppy is not simply a red guppy, it is also a metal guppy.
So what does this mean to the guppy breeder? It means you should pay attention to the metal color of an outcross strain. The type of iridophore carried by the outcross strain is going to influence the depth and tone of the resulting Full Reds.
As a side note, the fact that the eyes are completely black confirms another Bagnara observation, that melanophores and iridophores are in a see-saw relationship. When one is missing the other fills in. The time and resources I have invested in this cross is paying off!
At this point I found myself saying to myself, thank god my original goal to build a redder red failed!
In fact I have a cross going between a Chiasson Full Red and a Stoerzbach metal blue guppy. But I think the Glass Belly cross will prove to be more informative because the Glass Belly gene removed the iridophores, giving me a chance to observe the effect on the phenotype. We'll see.
There is another reason why I like this cross. It adds evidence to another hypothesis I have. What do you notice about the peduncle in the Glass Belly Full Red? It is missing a lot of red color. In fact you can see two wild type red spots in the peduncle area. The wild type guppy is showing through! This is quite a sight: the red spots found on wild guppies showing through on a full red.
You also notice the yellow color of the wild type guppy showing through, and possibly a yellow metal gene expressed at the base of the caudal fin. That may have come out of a cross with the original See-thrus so I will have to hold that thought for the outcome of the back cross to the Chiasson female.
But perhaps the biggest bonus that came out of this cross is what is not present on this guppy.
There is no other color color pattern on this guppy. I am not quite sure what to think about this. Why are there transparent areas on the peduncle? I would have expected the See-thru out cross to have contributed something other than the Glass Belly gene to the cross. I will have to think about it. I suspect that the Full Red gene or genes may alter the fate of all color cells, but I just don't know at this point that I can use this evidence until I complete the back cross.
You often hear people eschew theory and genetics in favor of blind breeding, where you throw two strains together to see what comes out the other side. The theory is that this form of throwing the dice is a lot of fun, not requiring the heavy lifting of conducting experiments and analyzing the results. But my failed Super Red design actually threw up a number of surprises and left me with some mysteries to ponder. It's the same game really, just played at a more sophisticated level. And when you play the game this way, you always come out on the winning side because you are always taking something away from the table. Not wandering out the door with empty pockets.
Comments
Come to think of it,your failures have contributed more to the hobby,than the failures of any other person in history.
Well done Philip.
A pure collectors item!
This fish could be the basis for creating 'blanks' of a particular colour (or not).
Then we would have a tool for imposing a pattern on a clear colour,much like Myron Gordon did when he created Bleeding Heart Platies.
I wonder if we could even produce a pattern of iridophores on this blank,as they do with Christmas Decorations ie using red balls in both Matte and Full Gloss finishes to create depth.
Then
Ryan: The Glass Belly gene removes iridophores...and iridophores are what create the color blue. But you could experiment with different metal guppies...maybe you would find an exception.
Anthony: I was thinking today that the reason you see transparent areas on this guppy is because it has the blond mutation, where the black color cells are present but are much reduced in size to the point they are invisible to the naked eye. The key I think to solid color guppies is black color cells. Even white guppies can be traced back to underlying melanistic genes that have been converted to white and I think solid metal guppies (like Stoerzbach) can be shown to be melanistic where the black is converted to iridophores. I happen to be working on this subject in the Color Manual right now where I present pretty compelling evidence. I like the way you are using your imagination. Just put some solid theoretical work under it and you can become a spectacular failure like me
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