A Universe in a Set of Fins

Anomaly

This is the latest mystery in my fish room. And this guppy might be responsible for delaying my Color Manual book for six months, at least.

It was born into a drop from a Full Red female that had been outcrossed to a Santa guppy, a guppy that includes the Full Red gene or genes, plus what I suspect is the Mg metallic gene. Is this an expression of the Mg gene? What happened to all the red? The fins seem slightly orange. Although the body color resembles that of a Japan Blue it is not quite the same. It lacks the saturation, coverage and depth of the Tyndall blue of the Japan Blue.

At first I thought its fins had yellow color cells, then I realized they are actually gold iridophores. So it is very probable this guppy has no yellow or red color cells. Does this mean it has the Asian Blau mutation? I do not think so, but it is possible.

I mated him to his sisters and have just taken a drop. Only one male looked like him, but it had yellow in its fins. A real mystery.

My Color Manual must provide some kind of theory for this strange anomaly. There is another drop from the Chiasson Full Reds that came from a cross with a Stoerzbach Vienna Emerald Green. It has a single male with a deep yellow body and red fins. That makes me suspect that the gene or genes creating this phenotype are inherited from the Full Red. But the phenotype is very different. Strangeness.

Meanwhile, I came across this quote a long time ago. I am not sure if I put it up on the site previously, but here it is again. I think it captures rather well a particular way of participating in the hobby.

From Simplexity: The Simple Rules of a Complex World, Jeffrey Kluger (2007), pp. 10-11:

“Human beings are not wired to look at matters that way. We’re suckers for scale. Things that last for a long time impress us more than things that don’t, things that scare us by their sheer size strike us more than things we dwarf. We grow hushed at, say, a star, and we shrug at, say, a guppy. And why not? A guppy is cheap, fungible, eminently disposable, a barely conscious clump of proteins that coalesce into a bigger clump, swim about for a few months, and then expire entirely unremarked upon, quickly decomposing into the raw chemicals that produced it in the first place. A star roars and burns across epochs, birthing planets, consuming moons, sending showers of energy to the limits of its galaxy.

Yet the guppy is where the magic lies. A star, after all, is just a furnace, a vulgar cosmic engine made up of three layers of gases that slam hydrogen atoms together into helium, release a little light and fire in the process and achieve nothing more than that. It may last for billions of years, but to what animating end? A guppy, by contrast, is a symphony of systems: circulatory, skeletal, optical, neurological, hematological, metabolic, auditory, respiratory, olfactory, enzymatic, reproductive, biomechanical, behavioural, social. Its systems are assembled from cells; its cells have subsystems; the subsystems have subsystems. And if so elegant an organism lives nor no more than a handful of months, what of it? Admire the fireball star if you must, but it’s the guppy we ought to praise."

What Kluger does not mention is that the color biology of the guppy is a whole universe in itself. The endless forms most beautiful of color and pattern provide a front seat on an unfolding drama. It is the story of development from the first glimmers of color on the developing embryo to the full panoply of color of an adult male. It recapitulates the development of vertebrae form and shows in brilliant color the competition for place and ascendancy of the three actors in this celebration of color, the iridophores, the xantho-erythrophores and melanophores. And because of the small size, short lifespan and fecundity of this little genetic model organism, every guppy keeper has the opportunity to become not only a spectator but the actual playwright, directing the drama.