Sorry for the short detour chasing down the "grass nile green" strain. (As you no doubt have learned as we have raveled through these breeding escapades, you never know what you will get when you open a tank of guppies.) Let's return to the F2 generation from the previous pool and see what Mr. Peacock Blue has hidden in his genes. To refresh your memory here are the males in the F2 generation we are exploring. In the last pool we selected the grass turquoise male. In this pool let's use Mr. Peacock Blue to father a F3 generation. Mr. Peacock Blue and one of his sisters produced this batch of F3 males. Nice, nice, very nice. Here we see a nice shinny bright clear turquoise color as well as the clear peacock blue. (And to think we started out many generations ago with that pale anemic powder blue color.) Selecting one of the peacock blue males and mating him with one of his sisters produced this batch of F04 males. Hummm, this looks like the peacock might be heterozygous for the turquoise (or vice versa). Let's switch to using a turquoise male for a generation or so and see what happens. Using a turquoise male this time produces this batch of F05 males. Do you see what I am trying to establish here? I want peacock blue. I will be thrilled if I get the turquoise. If the turquoise is heterozygous for peacock I will get peacock and also be thrilled. Again I select a turquoise male to father this batch of F06 males. Yep, turquoise is heterozygous for peacock. Mother AZ has caught on to what I am trying to do and offers only peacock males in this batch so switching to peacock at this point works for me. Using one of these males I produced this batch of F7 males.

Well, I'll be darned (or something like that). Will you look at what we have bumped into? Looks a little like cobalt to me. Grass cobalt, not clear cobalt, but still a step in the direction I was hoping to go. I remove these guys to a .fsh file clearly labeled COBALT (really, it is labeled "0 0 0 0 0 0 0 F7b has cobalt"), create a folder on my desktop marked COBALT, move the file into that folder so I will not loose it and return to the chase at hand. (How's that for a run-on sentence?). Selecting another female from the F6 but using the same male I produce another batch of F7 males. Ah yes, we are now on track for peacock blue. Selecting a male from this batch and one of his sisters produces this batch of F8 males. Looks like we have this phenotype stabilized. I took this strain out to the F12 generation without another phenotype showing up. Mother AZ has let us stabilized another strain of blue tuxedos. I decide to call this strain "tux clear peacock blue". Here is one of the F12 males all grown up. A tank full of these guys is a real pretty sight. Do you have yours yet? Now let's get back to that cobalt grass file waiting for us on my desktop. Here again are the guys in the F07a batch. I selected one of the cobalt males and mated him with one of his sisters to produce this batch of F8 males. Hot dayam! Don't quote me on this but I would speculate that the turquoise was heterozygous for both grass cobalt and clear peacock blue but since I was not searching the gene pool as I went along I did not notice it until the F7 generation. Just a hunch. I don't really have a clue. Here is one of the F12 generation males from this grass cobalt strain matured to 270 days. My handy dandy color utility says that this guy has twice as much navy blue as peacock blue. My eyes say that it still has a lot of peacock peeking out around the edges. This strain has a lot of navy in it but too much of the peacock color is present to really qualify as a true cobalt grass. I override my color utility and say this strain is nothing more than "grass peacock navy" or "grass navy peacock". We've still got a ways to go in our quest for clear cobalt but we are a lot closer than we were when we started. Now how in the heck do I get from "grass navy peacock " to "clear cobalt"? Let's see. Where do we go from here? Any ideas? I say enough of these blue/green green/blue colors. We've got to get back to the blues. GETTING BACK TO THE BLUES