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I'm curious about this now... I had one male guppy and two females. The male is a lovely yellow/black leopard spot pattern, the females are silver-bodied with yellow, black and blue in their tails. They're siblings from yellow-patterned parents.

One female died, but the other two are going strong. The female is still dropping fry even though the male (and all male progeny) has been seperated for a few months. The first drop produced six females, two males, all who looked very "guppy" in coloring.

Many fry did not survive, thankfully, or my ten gallon would be even MORE overstocked. However, subsequent drops have thrown five males, all of which have distinctly Endler coloring. The females look very much like the mothers, silver with yellow/black tails. The young males have flourescent greens and oranges in what I recognize to be Endler patterns. It's really quite odd...

My question is this: how often does something like this happen? Do I just have odd guppies or what? I mean, the Endler-males look NOTHING like the parents. Here's my thread in the photo booth with pictures: http://www.fishprofiles.com/interactive/forums/thread.asp?id=45310 The "endler's" colors become even more distinct as he ages and are now quite vibrant.

~Meow. Thus spoke the cat.~

That's what common guppies look like. The species are related, but guppies throwing males with splashes of color just means they've reverted to wild type, not that there's Endler background.
Endler:


Common guppy:


The guppy lacks the bright oranges and greens, tends to have more variation in tail types and colors, has more "soft shades", etc. Basically: if it wasn't sold as an Endler's it's a 99.99% guarantee it's a comon guppy, they're very, uh, common!

Pretty, though, eh? And totally underappreciated - they're sold as food but rarely if ever as pets unless they're wild caught.[/font][/font]

-Molly
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Hmm... I doub tthey were sold as endler's... I got my original trio from my sister's boyfriend. I'm not sure where he got his. The babies do have orange and green, but as you can see, they've got pink and such, too. *shrugs*

Is it common for guppies to revert to wild-types, then? It just caught me by surprise, I didn't expect this at all! ...and it completely throws off my sister's black, white and yellow tank scheme.

~Meow. Thus spoke the cat.~

Very common, especially with gups that may not have been all from the same spawn, or a few gens down the line.

Yeah, I wasn't clear enough about the color thing - guppies do have oranges and greens, but the SHOCKING NEON orange and green are mostly reserved for Endler's. Softer shades, bloches and dots rather than lines, etc, those tend to be guppies. Once you've seen an Endler, you've seen most of them - there's variation, but nothing like so much as there is in gups. The gups can look like almost anything!

-Molly
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Endler's and guppies will cross-breed...I've heard both yes and no that the offspring are fertile

Males Endler's are considerably smaller than females. I have ~6 generations actually notice the size difference quite early on. The males coloration starts in the tail and works its way forward as the fish grows.

There are variations in color patterning and some breeders are even getting some new colors in their lines but neon orange, green, and black dots are usually the standard with Endler's.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is water at the bottom of the ocean

True, but my point is that since common guppies already have all those colors and patterns (plus a billion more) the chance is almost 100% that they're just guppies, gone back to wild-type, rather than distant Endler's relatives. There just aren't that many Endler's in the gene pool, and I suspect there are none at all in the fancy-guppy strains. Why cross a small-tail, random pattern fish (that may produce sterile offspring) into a line of big-tail, specific color or pattern guppies? But common guppy ancestry is, of course, behind all fancy gups.

[span class="edited"][Edited by LittleMousling 2004-08-19 15:20][/span]

-Molly
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