2011 - The Year in Guppies
Blue Anomaly, which is for me Guppy of the Year
It is a annual tradition to sum up the best and worst of the previous year, and I am going to do the same with guppies on the eve of 2012. Only I am going to drop the part about the worst of the year because frankly I am tired of that end of the hobby.
I think this has been the best guppy year of the dozen of so years I have been in the hobby. What do I see as the most significant event? I think it was the publication of a study of the Mc1r gene in the guppy. For the past several years I had studied the melanocortin signalling pathway, in which the Mc1r plays an important role in pigmentation. But it was studied in other vertebrates, not the guppy. Here was the direct evidence that the guppy, after all, was no different than any other vertebrate in the basics of its color cell biology. Read more about what I said about this gene in the blog I wrote about it.
I think the second most significant event of the year was the passing of the 1000 mark on the Guppy Designer facebook page (it is now close to 1300 likes) and the increased activity on the Guppy Designer forum. I take this a strong sign that people are interested in the form of the hobby that I practice exclusively, which is the active exploration of guppy color development and biology. That is a pretty narrow focus, and a fairly hard hill to climb so I am constantly looking around to see if other people are on the same journey. The thread on the Guppy Designer froum which symbolizes the new sophistication and enthusiasm of the independent guppy color explorer is this one: Endler discussion. There is tremendous enthusiasm in this thread. It just so happens I acquired my first Endler ever, and I am going to use it (as Carl says in starting the thread) to explore a fresh perspective on guppy color genetics. Meanwhile I have spent a very enjoyable year engaged in a lively discussion about guppy genetics via good old-fashioned email with Dr. Rick Squire, retired professor of genetics, and Alan Bias, respected animal breeder and swordtail enthusiast. They have also been reviewing the Color Manual manuscript and giving me good feedback and suggested changes. The guppy geneticist hobbyist came of age this year!
Early in the year I made a concerted effort to catch up on the interesting pigment and pattern scientific research in the past few years in anticipation of finishing my new Guppy Color Manual book. Writing guppy books has always been first and foremost an opportunity to explore guppy genetics and color cell biology in a depth not possible to do without the act of formally writing it down. There has been huge progress in the field of pigment research in the past ten years, along with my own education in the field and the accumulating results of my own crossing experiments. Strange to say, but I think I finally began to fully understand guppy genetics this year. Or perhaps it is better to say it just opened up like a flower that had been budding for a long time. I have held firm to the goal of being a guppy designer rather than a guppy breeder, deliberately creating guppy phenotypes based on a knowledge of the underlying genetics. So many guppy color mysteries have been solved this year, such as Moscow genetics which eluded me all this time. The most elusive has been iridescent genetics. I remember I discovered a key to metallic guppies beside a river in Montana, on vacation, when I was reading zebrafish color cell research. (It was the discovery that the melanophore and iridophores share a common bipotent precursor.) In fact so many ideas about guppy genetics fell into place this year that I stopped working on the Color Manual so that I could properly vet them with guppy crosses in the next year.
In the best of the year, I have to include the guppy adorning this web page. It is a male that dropped out of a cross I did between a pet store guppy male and Full Red female. What is unusual about it is the metallic blue body and gold metallic fins. At first I thought it had yellow pigment fins. But the color cells are actually iridophores. In fact the guppy appears to entirely lack red and yellow pigment color and reduced black pigment. I have a hunch that it is due to a gene that has so far never been described either in the scientific literature or the hobbyist literature. The other scenario is that it is a combination of genes. It is exactly the type of guppy I am interested in, a color mystery.
2011 is the year in which the first IGEES conference was held.
On the very last day of the year a new livebearer journal, Poeciliid Research, was launched and I was invited to become one of its editors. Here it is: Poeciliid Research. Sharing duties as editor is Dr. Felix Breden of the Breden Lab, a Poeciliid research facility just twenty minutes from my house. Felix has invited me to see new livebearers he has collected in South America. I think I will take my fishing net with me. I will probably be publishing some research papers in the new journal. Also sharing duties is the German scientist and guppy specialist, Dr. Michael Kempkes. Michael wrote a book about guppies (in German unfortunately) which I made some small contributions to.
Finally I have re-discovered the pet store guppy tank after abandoning it more than a dozen years ago. Today I visited a Petsmart and saw that they had Pingus in it. That is an extremely encouraging sign, because I think almost all guppy hobbyists start their love affair with guppies in the pet store and to have so many mutant guppies showing up in the pet store is a good sign of the future of the hobby. And the Color Manual will allow people to understand not only how the Pingu trait is inherited, but also the development and differentiation of the trait in terms of the color cells. People trying to figure out the genetics of their pet store guppy are good candidates for hobbyists who will be future guppy hobbyist geneticists.
Comments
There is sooo much information in the Forum (complete with pictures)it is astounding. Great job Phil!
Carl
Philip
As I said to you before,in all the years I've been keeping aquariums,I have to say that your work is timeless.In the same way that Joanne Nortons work on Daylillies,Live bearers and Angelfish is as good now as when she wrote about them,your work will live very much longer than any of us.
On the subject of guppies,I doubt that any person has written anywhere as much information as you and you are to be congratulated for this contribution.At the same time,you have inspired and encouraged so many people to take pleasure in their hobby.
Oh,and thanks for the See-Thrus.....transparence by design....brilliant work.
I think I will ask you to be my biographer
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