The Enigma of the Full Yellow Guppy
Double Yellow Guppy, a strain I created
About ten years ago I was standing outside a conference room in a hotel in an American city whose name I cannot remember. It was a guppy show. And the man I was talking to was Hermann Magoschitz. He was a German breeder visiting the show.
He told me that he was going to develop a yellow guppy. "There has never been a yellow guppy," he said. That struck me because I thought there had been such a guppy. He made it sound like he was going to cross a desert on foot that had never been crossed before. I was impressed.
I don't remember the show, the hotel, the city or the exact date but I remember him putting an idea of a yellow guppy in my head. And it has been buzzing around in my head ever since like a song that I can't shake lose from.
Here it is ten years later and there is still no full yellow guppy.
The albino or blond yellow guppy does not qualify, Hermann told me, because it is too pale and transparent. "Not show quality!" "Not pure. Not show quality." Hermann sniffed.
Blond Moscow with a pale yellow color as well as some bluish and grey color.
The Full Platinum guppy, which has a base layer of white leucophores over which yellow color is spread does not qualify. "Not show quality. Not full yellow." Hermann said.
Albino Full Platinum Guppy
Why has there never been a solid, single color yellow guppy? Is there something peculiar about guppy genetics that prevents such a color?
As far as I know Hermann never achieved his objective, or we would have seen it on Aquabid by now.
Besides I now know it is impossible. I found that out two days ago. A single line or two in a scientific paper. Why did I not think of that? I had all the facts. I just had to connect the dots.
The reason was literally staring me in the face and dropping large hints. Even when I created the Double Yellow guppy you see at the top of this blog, which combines the Schimmelpfennig Yellow Platinum and Full Platinum mutations, I could not quite put it all together and come up with a simple theory. The guppy is actually born with a body full of yellow color cells. They are so small and so spread out your eye cannot detect them. How many times have I looked at the microscope images I captured without seeing what was so obvious? And there was something about the Full Platinum that had me thinking along the right lines...
It took a single sentence in a scientific article for the mystery to be solved. I stumbled on this article while researching another topic. As soon as I saw the reason my palm slapped against my forehead. "How could you be so stupid!" I shouted. My wife looked alarmed. I told her how I just discovered one of the most important facts about guppy color and it has been there in plain sight all along.
The story makes for a nice lesson in the value of combining original fish room research (as in the case of the Double Yellow but also other crosses using the Schimmelpfennig platinum gene) with academic research. We are approaching the 100 year mark in guppy research beginning with Schmidt in 1916, and nobody has ever been able to figure out why you can't have a pure Yellow guppy. The question never occurred to Schmidt because all he ever saw was the wild type guppy. In fact I have never seen the question asked in the scientific literature. Certainly no hobbyist has ever come up with the reason, as far as I know.
Just to be absolutely clear, a pure yellow guppy would have only a single pure yellow color. Like this "fake" Photoshop version of the above male:
The male has been Photoshopped to look like a pure, full body yellow guppy. However it still shows a metallic color. There are no yellow iridophores.
And it would not have the metallic shine that I didn't try to remove in Photoshop. It would be a dull full yellow guppy with perhaps a silvery ventrum and black eyes. There are no yellow iridophores. When you see a metallic yellow it is because yellow color cells sit above silver iridophores in the skin.
It turns out the answer to the enigma is very useful to me as I attempt to reverse engineer a Micariff, a type of yellow guppy with a shiny white metallic base. It points me in the right direction as I look for the combination of mutations to create this unique phenotype.
And that is the main point of this blog. A knowledge of the color cells and their relationships can save you a lot of time chasing guppy mirages. Just because you can see it in your imagination does not mean you can create it. You have to understand the rules of guppy color, which is to say the development and differentiation of color cells. You need the biology.
You cannot just figure it out standing in the fish room. There are many guppy breeders who have seen yellow guppies in their imaginations but who have never figured out how to make one. The Micariff is a magnificent failure. (In fact it is the strain most often passed off as a yellow guppy.)
The idea that you can figure it out yourself without recourse to biology or genetics theory is preposterous. Like a mirage in the desert, your ability to judge is compromised by your circumstances. You so badly want to create or see one the mirage swims right before your eyes. You need help to get to your goal.
At least that is what I assume. If you have figured out why there is no yellow guppy without any help and entirely on your own, then let me know. I am not interested in being right, just in finding the shortest path to deciphering guppy beauty. Perhaps you are a rare genius who has come up with something better than scientific methodology.
Actually even scientists never come up with things entirely on their own, not even Einstein. They constantly stand on the shoulder of others, so it is a safe bet that you will not figure even the most basic things about guppy genetics entirely on your own. Scientists have the equipment and training to get at the fundamental things. And they do their research. Why the hell wouldn't you read what they have to say? What makes you think you can figure this whole thing out yourself? Knowing why there can never be a yellow guppy is the most basic of insights.
You see that was my starting point back when I met Hermann. "I am not going to figure this out for myself," I thought. "And breeders anecdotes are probably not going to take me there."
If I had the answer to the yellow guppy enigma ten years ago I would have told Hermann he was going to waste a lot of time chasing that particular mirage. I have lost touch with him so I do not know how many tanks he devoted to his project, how many hours he spent looking hopefully in the next drop for that "one in a million" pure yellow guppy, how many oceans of water he siphoned from those tanks and replaced. How much water did he spit on the floor thinking furiously about what to try next and finally giving up. Myself, I say, slyly examining my dry hands, I have never got my hands wet trying to solve this problem. Maybe Hermann is still down in his fish room with his flash light pointed into a tank hoping like a guy with a torn lottery ticket for just blind luck. Lord, give me a full yellow guppy.
There is even a show guppy organization that has yellow as a class. But such a guppy is impossible, except for poor substitutes like the guppies you see above. And those illustrious judges have the temerity to blame breeders for their failure to produce a "decent" yellow guppy. A "weak class" they sniff rubbing their eyes.
But the yellow class is a mirage in the desert, maddeningly receding every cross you attempt. A sham really. Except that a classic mirage often symbolizes something that does exist somewhere. A place to slack a thirst that begs to be satisfied. Pure Full Yellow guppies will never be at the end of your quest. As thin of substance as the air and more inconstant than the wind...a Photoshop fake.
I would never have figured it out if I had not been in the middle of writing the Color Manual, connecting the dots, doing my research, all that prep work finally resulting in a flash of Eureka discovered by sheer serendipity.
Am I going to tell you why you cannot have a full yellow guppy? Yes I will. When I publish the Color Manual. Until then, I will hand this nagging question over to you. Only you will not have to wait ten years for the answer. It was going around in my head like a bad song for that long. Is it in your head yet? I am humming the tune right now.
Comments
as with your see thru guppy, that has all the colour layers "switched off", then i haven't enough knowledge to understand, why one cannot "switch off" the layers leaving the first one intact.
your riddle beats me.
the picture in the blog indicates yellow streaks, which you explain is heterozygous for the Asian Blau gene. why cannot these yellow streaks be selectively bred to recover the whole fish?
the blue sheen on the caudal would be something else again.
then it is impossible to create an all yellow guppy because using this combination of color cells that color does not exist.
If there is one kind of guppy to be considered "nearest “to full yellow guppy, i would say yellow snake skin.If i am not mistaken,one of your book stated,snake skin is belongs to platinum family, correct me if i am wrong.Basically, the pattern of the snake skin is produced by silver iridophores, and as you can see the yellow presents on snake skin is dull. My questions are what make the yellow on the snake skin to become dull? If the Sst and Ssb genes of the yellow snake skin cross over or vanished through mutation, is it possible to obtain full yellow cobra guppy without the pattern of cobra?
I can see you really like this puzzle Diego
Philip
Interesting approach to solving the problem. But the yellow snakeskin would not be considered to be a solid yellow color with no platinum or leucophore. It has to look like my fake Yellow guppy you see in the above article...just one solid yellow color...as yellow as the Full Red is red. But I would say you are definitely on track with this observation. I should stop teasing people with this question...but then it is a wonderful way to get people thinking out of the box about guppy color...so I think I will let it go on for awhile
Philip
so in the case of the moscow there is little or no iridiophores, then black color cells fill in and as we all know we need those iridiophores to make those yellow cells shine,so thats the reason we dont have a pure yellow moscow, there is not enough reflective cells and the other ones are black making the guppy not brigth enough.
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