In order to create our planned strain of "Tux Tiger Christmas Red" guppies we must have a stabilized strain of Mosaic Tiger guppies on file. Working with the Mosaics is always exciting. The Mosaics (as well as the Cobras) will present you with tiger, grass, tiger multi, grass multi, leopard and leopard multi tail patterns with which to work. Also packed into this gene pool are the colors red, brown, purple, green, yellow, gold, orange, blue, turquoise, pink, steel gray and pearl gray. Solid colors can also be found, isolated and stabilized. However, for the purpose of our next creative endeavor we just need a strain of plain generic Tiger Canary Mosaics to play with. If AZ presents us with a red phenotype in the early generations that will be a stroke of luck, but any other color will have to be saved to work with at a later time.
For this demonstration I loaded a fresh batch of Yellow Mosaic from the CD. I selected M13 and F13 to use as the parents of our F1 generation (yep, call me crazy). The CD Yellow Mosaics are usually a motley crew of muddy yellowish guys or a cleaner canary color. I chose M13 because of his number; any male from the Yellow Mosaic file would do to get started. Here is the father of the F1 generation.
M13 and F13 produced this batch of F1 males.
See, I told you it didn't matter which male I selected to father the F1. This batch of "camouflage" males (don't they look like they should be out hunting ?) is typical of what you will see in the F1. I selected the pair from the F1 with the highest VCP scores (yeah, right) to produce this batch of males in the F2. (Those of you who know me know that I pay no attention to VCP scores. However, I acknowledge the need some of you have to add another component to the selection process.)
Well, well. AZ has presented us with Green Tiger and Canary Tiger in this batch. Green we can save for later, camouflage is just not an attractive phenotype. Let's select the best of the Canary Yellow males and his highest rated sister to produce the F3 generation.
Here are the males produced in the F3 generation.
Well, we lost the green but we still have the camouflage phenotype. Again, we select the best Canary Tiger male and best female to produce the next generation, the F4.
Whoa, baby. This is not going in the right direction at all ! Let's go back to the F3 file and use that male with the best F4 female and see what we get as the F5 generation (remember back-crossing?). If we see any tail pattern other than tiger in the F5 from this back-cross we will abandon the back-cross approach and redo the F5 with a sibling cross form the F4. Tiger is dominant to grass and leopard, so a back-cross will quickly expose those genes if they are present. We gotta stick with the plan. We want tiger this time. Grass and Leopard can be searched for another time. The male from the F3 (great great granddad and the best female from the F4 produced this batch of males as the F5.
Much better. A paler yellow this time but at least the camouflage phenotype is not present. The highest rated pair from the F5 generation produced this batch of males as the F6.
OK, OK, OK. We are back on track now. Random pairs selected from the F7 through the F11 generations produced males that all looked like the ones seen in the F6. I saved each pair used into the F6 file to keep track of how many generations I tested. No use creating a new file for every generation when we are testing a strain for purity. Here is what the F6 file looks like by the F11 generation.
Each generation has been prefixed with a letter. I hope this makes sense to you. It is much easier to do than explain. I called it quits at the F12. Here are the males in that generation. I say this strain is stabilized. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Here are the records of the crosses saved to create this strain in my "Items" folder. I hope you can see how I keep what records I need in the file names of each cross. This method works for me, call me crazy.
We now have a stabilized strain of Yellow Mosaic Tiger to use in our out-cross with the Christmas Red. One strain of "Tuxedo Tiger Christmas Reds" coming up.
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