Well, well, well. We started out with nothing but CD pet shop variety guppies and now look at the stabilized strains we have filed away with which to play. Each strain took less than an hour to create and stabilize. We've put the red into tux and tiger tail pattern on top of the red color. Now we hope to turn this Tux Tiger Christmas Red into an albino version. Ain't this game fun?! Let's take a female from the Tux Tiger Christmas Red file and a male from the Albino Christmas Red file and see what happens. If both of our strains are in fact stabilized, all the males in the F1 should look alike. Since both of these strains are many generations removed from the original CD guppies, will we still see the multi (crescent) phenotype in the F1 males? Albino is a recessive trait, so we do not expect to see any albino males in the F1. Albinos won't show up again until the F2.
Here are the males produced in the F1 generation.
WOW! What a gorgeous batch of F1 beauties. Grass patterned Christmas red tuxedos. This is a perfect example of what a professional guppy breeder would produce in order to have a uniquely beautiful strain to enter into a guppy show. He would maintain the Albino and Tux strains just to create these F1 guys for the purpose of winning prizes in a guppy competition. This F1 is not only the end of the line but also possibly the start of something wonderful. Let's pick the best pair (VCP scores for those of you so inclined) and see how AZ shuffles this gene pool.
Here are the males produced in the F2.
Well, well, we see dad, granddad and great granddad (from both sides of the family) represented here. Only one albino female was produced. Since our goal phenotype is Tux Tiger Christmas Red, I selected the male that exhibits this phenotype to mate with his one albino sister. Mating him with his non-albino sisters will also produce albinos in the F3, but I want this demonstration to be as straightforward as possible.
Here are the F3 males produced by this pair.
No males here we can use. Let's take a chance and do a back-cross, using the male from the F2 with an albino daughter from the F3.
Here are the males produced in this F4.
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! An albino tux snakeskin! You never know what a back-cross might produce. Sorry folks, I am going to abandon the search for the tux tiger and chase this tux snakeskin. I can always go back to the F1 file and look for the tiger after I nail this snakeskin down. I find the snakeskin phenotype one of the most ideal because the dorsal fin has the same pattern as the tail. I rename this guy "snakeskin" and select a female to mate him with to produce the F5 generation.
Here are the males produced in the F5 generation. I tried all four females in the F4 and they all produced these two phenotypes.
Oh no, don't tell me these guys and dolls are heterozygous for the grass pattern. I have learned that the appearance of the overlay in the early generations of a grass strain usually leads to a more pronounced grass pattern latter on. (This is not etched in stone, but does occur most of the time.) Well, a couple of sibling/sibling crosses should show us what we have to work with. We've gotta find the "right female" that does not produce grass sons. (I don't want to do another back-cross, `cause things can get real goofy when that approach is taken.)
The fourth female produced this batch of F6 males.
Looks promising. Did we find the "right female"? The F7 generation will let us know.
Here are the two males the first female produced. AZ gave me twelve females with these two males. Cute AZ, real cute. (I know Mother AZ is alive!)
The F8 through the F14 generations continued to produce all tux snakeskin males. I took the strain out this far to make sure that the grass pattern was not hidden somewhere in the gene pool.
Here are the males from the newly created Albino Tux Snakeskin Christmas Red Stock file.
Here is a male (270 days old) from this strain illustrating the phenotype.
This is a beautiful, subtle phenotype. (BTW, the snakeskin phenotype does not originate in the cobra or mosaic strains, IMHO. I first ran across this phenotype in the red tails.)
For those who are interested, here are the crosses made to produce this strain.
Now, let's go back to the F1 generation and see if we can create the tux tiger phenotype.
Five hours have elapsed.
Well, I have been chasing the tiger tail pattern in this gene pool for five hours. AZ says, "you can't get there from here". This happens all the time. I suppose one could say that you can play this game two ways. You can play "with" AZ or "against" AZ. AZ will let you have many phenotypes when you are playing "with" AZ, but will make you crazy if you try to play "against" AZ. I did fix several additional phenotypes from this out-cross; albino tux clear cardinal, mosaic snakeskin in albino and non-albino, and a gorgeous black ruby snakeskin in tux and non-tux. Those are the phenotypes AZ wanted to allocate me from this out-cross. These strains are filed away to use in future out-crosses. I'll take what I can get.
We have yet to explore the Cobra phenotype. Let's stabilize a strain of Cobras to fool around with. One strain of stabilized Cobras coming up.
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