Mother AZ has this to say about heterozygous guppies: An individual having unlike genes at a given locus, thus producing unlike gametes for the characteristic in question. Non-purebreediing. Non-purebreeding? What does this phrase mean? Does non-purebreeding mean that heterozygous individuals and strains are of no use to us? Should we rant and rave when the phenotype we find most attractive turns out to be heterozygous for one or two "plain Jane" phenotypes that we already have filed away in .fsh files? Of course not! As I have said previously in this series of articles, heterozygous guppy strains are to be found in the real world of guppy breeding and are sold for big bucks. Variety is the spice of life. If I were looking to purchase several strains of fancy guppies from a professional real world guppy breeder I would be primarily interested in strains that were heterozygous. More bang for the buck. Let's take a look at several examples of real world guppies both homozygous and heterozygous. Shown below is an example of a homozygous strain of show guppies currently available from a commercial breeder of show guppies. The breeder provides this description of the strain. This guppy is a striking metallic half-pink color with a black to bronze belly. The photos above are of young males 4-5 months of age.This show winning strain is slow growing and extremely fertile. This strain breeds 100% true. This is a very good example of a real world homozygous strain of guppies. Each and every male produced by this strain will look exactly alike. You could have tanks and tanks of guppies and each and every male would look no different than any of his relatives. You could rest assured that you would never see another phenotype show up in your tanks from this strain. For many people this is a very desirable goal. (Boring!) Now, let's take a look at two examples of commercially available heterozygous guppy strains. The breeder provides this description of the strain. This strain is a medium-sized Japanese developed strain that is highly prized in Japan and extremely rare in the USA and is the albino variety of the Blue Glass strain. Blond albino and regular albino red/multi glass appears with it in every litter. May also throw some albino pastel blue, albino pastel green and longfins. The breeder provides this description of this strain. This is a Japanese strain that is popularly known as Shadow Dancer or Full Metal Blue Glass. It comes with ribbon longfins as well. Some full metal red/multi glass (with longfins) are also produced in every litter. If you purchased either of these heterozygous strains you could produce guppies that would exhibit some degree of variability. If your breeding program was successful you might produce several homozygous strains from these gene pools that displayed different phenotypes. By out-crossing these strains you could be well on your way towards developing strains never before seen by another living soul. For some people this might be a desirable goal. (That would be me!) What would I do if I had the time, money and energy to again try my hand at real world guppy breeding? I would buy a trio of all three of these strains and start having some fun! I would start off with six tanks (one for each female's first litter) and purchase an additional six when the sexes needed to be separated. I would change the water every week and keep an eye on the filters. I would raise brine shrimp and feed the little critters every four hours to ensure that they grew fast in the best possible health. As my guppy hobby grew I would of course buy additional tanks, lights, filters, air-line tubing, gang valves, pumps and heaters. Before long I would have to convert one of the rooms in my home into a guppy room sorta like the ones shown below.

My life would be totally dedicated to my guppies. My guppy breeding hobby would consume all of my time, money and energy. My wife would divorce me (she said she would if I did before we got married). Wait! Whoa! This daydream has taken a sudden turn in a direction I have no desire to go. Let's get back to my reality. What if Mother AZ replaced real world guppy breeding with virtual guppies? What if Mother AZ replaced Mother Nature? Yeah, that's the ticket. Let's go virtual. (Whew, back on track. My wife hasn't divorced me, yet. Gotta watch those daydreams.) .Fsh files can replace hundreds of tanks (or .azn files if I really want to go crazy). Feeding will be automated. Water changes and filter cleaning can be accomplished by a click of the mouse. Instead of waiting three or four months to see what my genetic manipulations have produced I can warp the fry to maturity in seconds. The cost was less than $30 and my wife bought the darn game for me! Cool! Working with Mother AZ's heterozygous guppies is lots of fun if you just accept the situation. Who says a strain has to be homozygous? Not me. Let's create a few heterozygous strains and see what we can produce. With Mother AZ you can be assured that the majority of the multi phenotypes will be heterozygous for one or two additional phenotypes. Most tiger multi, leopard multi, grass multi and clear multi phenotypes you will discover in F1 and F2 generations are almost always heterozygous individuals, especially if the color is some shade of orange. Let's throw some heterozygous strains together and see what Mother AZ will let us discover. How does one go about stabilizing a heterozygous strain? "Tis very easy and simple to do. Back-crossing to the selected male for six or so generations will do the trick in about fifteen minutes. (The phenotype I call "tiger multi quad" is a notable exception to this technique. Those guys pack a lot of stuff in their genes.) In past pools I have shown you how to laboriously travel through multiple generations, searching for the "right sister", on your way towards finally stabilizing the strain. Let me show you a quicker method. Take a look at this strain. I love this phenotype. However, I have only been able to reproduce this phenotype as a heterozygous strain. If I always use a "clear multi burnt orange tangerine" male to father the next brood I can perpetuate this strain, but the other two phenotypes (clear tangerine and clear topaz) will always show up in the broods (and since they are the "fors" in this strain they are easily stabilized as individual homozygous strains). I first ran across this phenotype in the albino version and the guys sported "go light green" pectoral fins. For the purpose of this "show and tell" I selected one of these guys, named him "dad" and mated him with a generic non-albino female. Always selecting a non-albino female as the "Mom" I used "Dad" (poor Dad) to sire three generations. In the F3 generation a non-albino version of "dad" appeared in the matured males. This guy was named "dad" and was used to father the next six generations. I did not stop to look at the males produced along the way (yeah, right!). By the F6 generation the males exhibited only three phenotypes. I continued this process for two more generations and observed no deviation in the three phenotypes produced. Depending on the number of males Mother AZ produced in the batches I could always count on seeing mostly "clear multi burnt orange tangerine"; one or two"clear topaz" and maybe "clear tangerine". Now, this strain is non-purebreeding but the strain is certainly stabilized. The process took only eight generations and was accomplished in about twenty minutes. This is the technique I use to stabilize all of my strains, homozygous and heterozygous. If a guy is heterozygous you can quickly discover what he is heterozygous "for". If the guy is homozygous you will know in about six generations as all of the males will start to look identical. This approach would not be possible with real world guppies. "Dad" might be able to sire the F2 generation but he would be long past his prime by the time the F3 gals were of breeding age. Now how can this approach be used to discover new and different colors and tail patterns Mother AZ has programmed for us to find? Let's say you have a unique color you would like to explore. What could you do? Use your selected "Dad" to produce the first couple of generations. Check out the males in the F3 - F4 generations looking for phenotypes that you haven't seen before that might appeal to you. Produce F2-F4 generations utilizing several females from the original F1 generation to see what Mother AZ will reveal to you. When you come across a male that exhibits a phenotype you find attractive use that male in a series of back-crosses to quickly stabilize whatever he is hiding in his genes as a stabilized strain. Clear? OK, OK, I'll explain this process in more detail. For this "show and tell" I selected this male from my files.

The tiger multies are some of the most colorful phenotypes Mother AZ produces. Creating different colors using these guys is fun to do. Let's see what happens when this guy is out-crossed with the heterozygous strain of "clear multi burnt orange tangerine". When using a heterozygous strain as the mother quotient in an out-cross you have no idea just what she is bringing to the mix. If the strain exhibits two or three phenotypes in the males how do you know what phenotype the females represents? Beats me. I'm sure you could set up a series of experiments to determine what she is packing in her genes but why bother? Not knowing is part of the fun. (I consider her a chaos generator. An unknown factor in the equation.) If I don't find anything interesting with the first female selected, I try another female. OK, let's get on with this out-cross. This "cobra tux tiger multi red copper" male was mated with arandom female from the "clear multi burnt orange tangerine" strain. The males produced in the F1 generation were a motley crew. As you can see several phenotypes were produced. This is to be expected when you out-cross two known heterozygous strains. Since Mom was non-tux the F1 males carry only half a dose of the tux gene and a double dose of tux is necessary for the males to exhibit the tuxedo body type. At some point I will have to decide if I want this strain to be tux or non-tux. I used the "cobra tux tiger multi red copper" male to father the next three generations. There was nothing special to be seen (to me) in the F2 generation but in the F3 generation one of the males really caught my eye. As usual, I named him "wow". I used this "wow" male as the "dad" for the next ten generations. By the F7 generation I was seeing only three colors/tail patterns in the batches of matured males but I was still observing tux and non-tux body types. This was due to the fact that I was not searching for the "right sister' along the way. Since "Dad" was non-tux I knew that sooner or later the selected female would also be non-tux and I could then eliminate the tux gene from this strain in a couple of generations. (Eliminating tuxedo and albino genes from a gene pool can often times take far more generations than you would expect.) Here are the males produced in the F13 generation. Here are the males of this strain matured to ten months of age. Using the same "wow" male, I mated him with a randomly selected albino tux female (I prefer my albino strains in tuxedo. Just personal preference.) An albino tuxedo version of the "wow" male's phenotype appeared up in the F3 generation and I used him as the "dad" for the next five generations. Poof, another stabilized heterozygous strain. Here is Mother AZ's albino rendition of this phenotype. Look familiar? Check out the tank shot on the introduction page of the "Guppy Gallery".You will find that many of the "tiger multi" strains are heterozygous for tiger phenotypes. However, this is not always the case. Another color variation I uncovered along the way in this out-cross (using a different original "mom" from the "clear multi burnt orange tangerine" strain) led me to this heterozygous strain. The rich navy blue color of the peduncle contrasted against the rich chocolate brown of the tail really caught my eye. This guy proved to be heterozygous for just one other phenotype, "tiger multi navy". Now, the important thing to note from all of this is that all of the "fors" can easily be stabilized as homozygous strains. I have tripped over many "fors" that I had previously considered only possible as heterozygous phenotypes. Try this approach with the Blue Grass .fsh file. Sure took the mystery out of that mess of heterozygous gene pools for me. To date I have yet to uncover the right combination of colors/patterns to cause Mother AZ to produce a male that is heterozygous "for" some variation of "tiger multi some shade of intense orange". (Hey, what do you expect from me! I took two months off to play with the Mekasia and The Sims.) Some time, some where when I least expect it, the strain will show up as a "for". Not to worry, the fun is in the chase. To be sure I will uncover a few more "fors" along the way that will be different to some degree from those I have already uncovered. I'll let you know. BTW. I set up a new guppy breeding tank for this article. Taking my own advice I did not add any plants to the tank. For the first time in my AZ experience Mother AZ started giving me small broods of only five to eight fry, rarely a batch of ten or eleven fry. I covered the bottom of the tank with riccia and copra. Poof, the next batch had seventeen fry in it. Problem resolved. Mother AZ seems to prefer that her "little bits of code" be provided with plants. "What's the deal with grass?"