Guppys to Goodieds Part 1

Livebearers are fascinating fish, from the humble Guppy that graces so many of our tanks, through to less well known species, but there’s a lot more than meets the eye. Come and join me as I dive into the world of livebearers. 

 

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Welcome back to the Tropical Fish Keeping UK podcast. And this time around we’re looking at Guppies to Goodieds. So we’re looking at livebearers from the humble guppy that we all know through to, I think, the slightly more exotic, less well known species of Goodieds and all other livebearers around. As ever, I think this is going to be a multi-part one because I think there’s so much information here I can’t cram it all into one episode.

So my name’s Ruth, and I find Livebearers fascinating. And yeah, that did just sound like I’m attending some sort of meeting. But I think that little evolutionary marvels from your Amazon mollies that have lost the need for males of their own species, although they do need a closely related species, males, but each of their offspring is a complete clone of the mother. Right the way through to our humble guppy, which in my opinion is one of the best adaptations adapted. Fish. Sorry, I can’t speak today. Adapted fish for spreading their genes, although I don’t think it’s one of the best fish to keep as an aquarium fish. I think it’s great. It’s got some problems. So what is a livebearer? The biological term is viviparity, which just means that the eggs develop inside the female, and that there is some way that the offspring can be kept alive internally while they develop. Back to our fish example. For example, guppies have much larger eggs, so they’re about two millimeters, which means that as the offspring are developing, they rely quite heavily on the yolk, whereas some other species only have much smaller eggs, which relies. They’re relying much more on the mother giving them nutrition. So you’ve got the whole spectrum there. But think about anything that lays eggs. The eggs develop through those initial stages inside the mother. A chicken egg starts as an over the yolk, and the hen is born with all her future eggs over. When one is selected to become an egg. It spends the next ten days developing, then about a day having all the other bits added to become an egg. And then about three weeks outside the hen becoming a chick. The longer the hen holds onto that egg, or I should say, the longer the mother holds onto that egg or the female holds onto that egg, the more it will develop before being laid, and the shorter time she will have to actually sit there and incubate her eggs or for fish, sort of hover around and try and keep them safe. Or for things like Tetris, they just scatter them and leave them to their things. So the longer they’re between being laid and hatching, the more chance they’ve got of just being eaten by something wandering along. So it’s also safer in some ways for the mother if she actually has any care of the brood, because the longer they’re internally, the more she can move around and run away. But it’s much more energy intensive to grow them on. And she can also carry fewer offspring. Something like a tetra will lay hundreds of eggs in one go, where as a guppy is maybe in the dozens when she lets all her young out. So Livebearing fish in some ways have managed the best of both worlds, but they’ve got some evolutionary adaptations that they’ve had to do to get there. The first is that it’s internal fertilization, so you don’t just have the male or the female scatter the eggs, then the male come over and scatter his sperm. And so most fish we keep in the aquarium, the female lays the eggs and the male then scatters. Afterwards you’ll sometimes see discus. The female angels is really good for it as well. Females will lay lines of eggs, then the male will follow over those. With discus you sometimes get a problem, you think you’ve got a pair, and then one female goes and lays all her eggs, and then the other female goes and lays another row of eggs over them. Yeah, I think we’ve all anyone who’s been breeding discus has had that happen. But if you’ve ever seen a male guppy or Molly or any livebearers chasing the female around the tank with his anal fins stuck out and angled angle towards her. Then you’ve seen the process of internal internal fertilization. And if you’ve had any youngsters around at the time, you may have had an awkward conversation. But many of the live bearing fish we keep in the aquarium have another adaptation. They can store the sperm. So after the male has deposited his half of the genes, the female can store those genes as sperm in her ovaries, so in folds, in her ovaries. And studies have found viable sperm up to ten months after a female was last in the same tank as a male. That’s not to say that’s like the longest that they can hold them. It’s just the longest of studies being done that proved it. So it could well be longer. So that means unless your female guppy, Molly Swordtail, has never seen a male since she was just a few weeks old, then she can and will produce fry for about a year afterwards. And trust me, it’s quite difficult to split females off when they’re young enough to have never been mated. If you’re breeding guppies, you go for something called the Virgin female. So you split her off into a separate tank, split females off from males quite young. And then you’ve got a group of virgin females. The problem is, nine times out of ten, you’ve missed a dull male, which means all your lovely females that you are bringing on for a particular breeding project have just been mated by the most boring male that you have in the entire tank. It’s not as much of a problem as you might think, though, because there’s another thing that female livebearers can do, and that’s actually they can select the sperm internally. So she can choose. So the studies have shown it’s the most attractive mate. And that’s normally done on orange. The orange spot on the side of them which is really important in Wild Guppies. So when you’ve got this you can actually choose. Now is she choosing most attractive or is she choosing most genetically diverse? I’ve read the studies and it’s not being made clear. The orange spot, however, is a bit like a peacock tail. So if you are a fish living in the river and you’ve got this bright neon orange spot on you, you are more likely to be eaten. Which means by having that, you’re just showing your fitness how fit you are, how fast you can get away from predators, how smart you are to evade predators, and is that that the females are looking for when they choose their mate? Both when they’re sort of swimming around in the wild, but also after the deeds been done. But what this means, evolutionary wise, is a female livebearer can mate with a male, and then she can swim away to a different area, completely taking with her potential for hundreds of fry with potentially different males in the mix. So yes, they’re all going to be genetically hers, but they’re not all going to be genetically from one male, assuming she’s been with more than one male so she can have a huge array of genetic diversity held internally, ready to be born in a completely different part of the water. And most females have a range of ages developing at any one time, so it’s not like she develops one lot. She lets that lot go and then she starts developing another lot. She’ll have a range of them on the go. So that means by the time she reaches there, she will probably have something ready to go, or very soon we’ll be able to populate that entire area. So she can produce hundreds of fry all on her own, and they will have enough genetic diversity to produce an entire new population in that area. And that is why guppies are one of the most invasive species going. And crucially, in the wild, because of such a genetic diversity, because so many of them die, they can evolve, adapt, adapt whichever way relatively quickly. It’s not huge, but it is something. So we do have guppies living in areas that are literal sewage works and they seem to be doing okay. Interestingly enough, if you take them out of there and pop them in fresh, clean water, they don’t tend to do as well. It’s really interesting that that that can happen because the ones in the aquariums aren’t that tough. So with these live bears, I mean, I keep referring to guppies because I think they’re the live bear. We know the best. And we’re going to start with the humble guppy as an aquarium thing. So guppies were first discovered in Venezuela in eighteen fifty nine and named Poecilia reticulata by Wilhelm Karl Hardwig Peters. He’s discovered other things. You’ve also got some fish named after him. He’s a big name in fish discovering. And they were also discovered in Barbados two years later. But I think the one we’re going to recognize the most is in eighteen sixty six. And that’s in Trinidad by Robert John Lechmere Guppy. Um, given how recently endless have been recognized as a different species from guppies, I’m always curious as to which species those early explorers had discovered. But we do know that it was the Lechmere Guppies name that had stuck to this little fish. So I think Lechmere Guppy, aside from the whole fish thing, has to be one of history’s most fascinating characters, although his mother’s is equally worthy of praise. So Lechmere was raised by his grandparents in a castle in Herefordshire because his parents were living out in Trinidad. So he was meant to take over the family estates. But aged eighteen, he inherited some money off a different family member and boarded a ship and headed for the South Seas. He ends up being shipwrecked on the New Zealand coast, spends two years with the Maori before heading for Trinidad himself, and mentioned his mother. She’s an early pioneer of photography and she’s involved in various scientific projects. And you have to wonder, his dad was a lawyer and sometimes looking at me, let me produced a huge amount of work. He did a huge amount of studies, and it always feels like he got that from his mother rather than his father. Um, you’ll hear rumors or you’ll hear it said that it’s the Reverend Guppy that he was a reverend. Uh, no evidence of that whatsoever. And there’s an interesting book out there I want to say it’s by his daughter, but it could be his granddaughter, um, about his life. And it’s really interesting. Uh, he’s not a reverend. She never mentions it at all. She never makes any mention of that. She mentions, you know, his wife, where he lived, the problems he had, but none of that. But his mother, she’s this early pioneer of photography. And put your mind to this. This is the eighteen hundreds, mid eighteen hundreds. This is a woman, upper class, you know. Remember Lakshmi, his grandparents castle, Herefordshire, all this nice stuff. Money that they could just go and live in Trinidad. Her husband’s this lawyer. I’m gonna say he was governor of Trinidad. Pretty sure he was. So she has got some title to her name. So what does she decide to do? She decides to carry up the going up the river Orinoco in a canoe by herself. But I’m going to put a huge asterisk on this one. So alone by herself in the meaning of the word at the time. So you went alone into the jungle with a couple of servants and some locals to carry your stuff, and in this case, locals to paddle the kayak, the canoes. Um, but I’m reading another book about a guy who went alone into the jungle of Burma with his personal servant. Another servant? Six elephants, all with packs. Uh, each elephant had their own, uh, team to look after each of those. He had a chef with him? Yeah. So completely alone. Other than all the other people they took with them, I suspect that they mean alone in that they didn’t have an upper class Englishman with them. It’s it’s wonderful. And when you read some of these people’s work, they go, oh, there was no other human around except for the two hundred tribesmen that surrounded me. And then they go on to speak and that they admire the tribesmen. There’s no hint of like, I think these are lesser people, but then they come out with statements that seem so racist by today’s standards. It’s in that way. It’s absolutely fascinating. Anyway, back to the fish. So if you’ve ever seen a wild guppy and I mean something actually wild that’s come out of the wild, not, um, the like some like a wild type strain, which we do have. They’re small, far less color. They look very like what we expect. Wild type. Endless to be. You used to be able to say they look like endless, but we’ve now bred endless to be so much more colorful. So wild type. Endless. But they’ve all got this bright orange spot on them. Females choose fish with that bright orange spot on them. Even in the highest predation areas going, they don’t lose that bright orange spot. Studies have talked about them losing all the black, all the green. They in some areas they’ve got more blue, some areas they’ve got a different color. But the consistent thing across wild guppy populations is the males all have that bright orange spot, which we don’t have on a lot of aquarium strains. So like I say, hybridization areas orange is much less low. Predation areas orange gets much more. But yeah it’s fascinating. So as well as the different colors and size and tail shape and fin shape and nearly everything, guppies, well guppies. And again, I mean actual ones out the wild have totally different behaviors. The males court the females rather than just chasing them. They perform these gorgeously delicate dances in front of the females, shimmying in front of her. And you can remember, the females on the wild types are much larger than the males, and if she rejects him or just ignores him, he tends to swim off, do his own thing for a bit. He’s gonna come back. He’s gonna be persistently annoying, but he’s not going to chase her to death like we see in aquarium strains. We don’t get that sex pest behavior where it’s just constantly da da da da da da da da da. Yeah, he’s got a chance. He’ll come over, he’ll do a bit of dance. He’ll see if he can sidle up to her. But it’s more like annoying guy at the disco rather than abusive sod. It’s that sort of difference. But in the wild, sometimes you find the females will form a group with the male sort of coming in to attempt to wow a mate. In some cases, the males will also group together and then the females will approach them. The studies I’ve read about them, I read those studies, and then I read all the studies that say, ah, oh yes, the fish in that area may be completely different species. So is this cultural? I use the word culture in the loosest sense of the word. Or is this a species specific behavior? We don’t entirely know. The other question is, even if they are, what we’d say are the same species today, are they isolated populations and are they branching off in different directions? Again, we don’t know. Maybe that’ll be answered soon. But there is a question I got answered. So there’s this really strange behavior in the wild. A predator comes up to a guppy swims up, they’re going along, and instead of, you know, running away or something like that, swimming away as fast as they can, the guppies. And interestingly enough, this has only been observed in female guppies, but they’ll actually approach the predator’s head so they’ll swim as if they’re going to cross right in front of the predator like almost touching distance. And this is known as matador or Matador. Matador like diversion tactics. Okay. And like I say, complete puzzle. As a survival strategy, it lacks that crucial thing, you know, survivability, which I think is a crucial thing. But twenty twenty study that I’ve only just managed to find and read has finally answered the behavior. So female guppies. She starts to swim close to the predators face. So she’s swimming along and she’s going to cross right in front of him. And as she’s going, she blackens their irises, makes these huge black eyes on her face. Now predators nearly always go for the eyes. That’s why you see eye spots on the back of a lot of fish. I mean, Oscars are a great example of it. We tend to think of Oscars as predators. And don’t get me wrong, they will be. But in the wild, they are also prey. So they have big eyespots on their tails. The idea being the predator will go for the tail and then the fish can go. So female guppies she’s swimming up. She’s got these big black eyes now. And as the predator lunges for her, they’re gonna lunge directly at her eyes, at the nose, and she can twist on her center of mass and allow the predator to just go straight past her. She is now behind the predator, very close to them still, but she’s behind and to the side. She can now leg it because the predator is going to have to turn round in their own circle, so she’s now got a much better chance. Rather than trying to run away from the head, she can now run away or underneath off to the side. Much better. And it’s fascinating that actually that’s a very, very good reason to do this. Whereas before we were thinking why that is completely irrational. But even with that sort of thing in the wild, guppies have this live fast, die young strategy, especially for the males. So many barely make it past sixteen weeks. But as long as they’ve they passed on their genes, then evolutionary wise, that’s job done. The fact the next generation or their generation, sorry, the ones I’ve just passed on their genes, the fact that they now get eaten or die to a due to a variety of issues, it doesn’t matter evolutionary wise. You’ve passed on your genes. I mean, octopus, octopi, they often lay their eggs like the giant Pacific. She lays her eggs, she goes into a crevice with her eggs, and then she just sits there and dies. She wastes away, but she manages to protect her eggs and pass on her genes. The species of mantis. There’s also possibly a species of snake where the female will eat the male after copulation. He’s dead, but he’s already passed on his genes, which is all that matters as an evolutionary strategy. As a survival strategy. Again, not great, but this means that maybe they’re not destined for long life in the wild. In the aquarium, we have a totally different strain. If I gave you a wild guppy and a aquarium strain guppy without any information that you knew they were the same species, you wouldn’t even think they were in the same genus. You would say they are totally different fish. Now, I’m not one hundred percent convinced that the strains that we know as the Trinidad Guppy. So, um, reticulata, I don’t think they are, at least not entirely. That orange dot so important in the wild is missing in most of our strains. You look at all the colors we’ve got quite frequently. They ain’t got that orange dot. Some of them do, though. Size is larger. Um, the reason I’m that’s in part because for one hundred years or so we’ve been selecting or nearly one hundred years we’ve been selecting the larger females because they produce more babies. So that’s probably an artifact of breeder choice rather than anything else. But I think they’re probably hybrids. I wonder, is there a population or a species in that hybrid that isn’t around today or we’re not aware is around today, but the problem is we’re not really going out and looking. It’s very, very difficult to identify the difference between two very, very similarly looking fish in the wild. And this is where the problems come. If an expert in that area stumbles across them yeah, you’ve got a chance. And that’s how we’ve identified things like Endler’s were separate and stuff like that. But there could be a whole species living in a river that just no expert has been there yet, and nobody’s really cared to look at the minutiae of the different species. It could have also been wiped out by now. We just don’t know. But hybrids can change things quite drastically, and chiefly they can bring in more possible color combinations. Colors can be on different alleles, different points in the DNA. So you might have one species that has it at point I don’t know one hundred and two, whereas another very closely related has a completely the same color or a or different color on point forty thousand and twenty. I am making those numbers up. They mean absolutely nothing. But what it means is when you cross them, you’ve suddenly got extra colours in the mix or extra colours on extra places. So what might be dominant and recessive in one can suddenly become codominant, because they can both exist at the same at different points. So you suddenly get different mixes and all this sorts of stuff. And if you want to look at it. Discus. Discus are probably one of the more colorful fish that we have in the aquarium. And the reason we have those colors and we know it’s that is because we’ve mixed the various species of discus together to make these aquarium strains. I’m not going to list the various color alleles that we know about. That’s better. For an article. I will write that. I will put it on the website, but I’m going to point out one thing that was going around not that long ago about color. It was everywhere on my social media feed. It was proven that orange male guppies were twice as horny as other males. Except it sorta wasn’t so like they made this great statement. Female guppies prefer orange and unusual patterns. And then they put a link to the original research paper on that. So I go to the original research paper and it goes, yeah, our females didn’t prefer anything, to be completely honest. We couldn’t show anything at all, which is just a bit annoying because actually, I could give you ten studies that say that females do prefer orange patterns, but they picked one that just went, eh, we didn’t get any results that said anything like that, which was just. Yeah. So yeah, take that one with an absolute pinch of salt. Which, by the way, is something guppies can’t take back to that one in a second. Fascinating. But here’s one thing. Have you noticed guppies getting more colorful lately? Female guppies specifically. Have you noticed? Like it used to be, you had a tank full of colorful males, and then you’d have a tank of grey females, and you couldn’t tell what genes they had, you might. I remember looking at someone spotting some vague, faint snake skin sort of patterns, but they used to be this assumption that the female didn’t matter. We’re now becoming more and more aware that the female contributes fifty percent of the color genes. So at least from the fifties, we’ve known if you put hormones specifically testosterone in the water or testosterone substitute, you could get the females to color up like the males. And they did it to identify what genes the female was carrying. Now that would only show the genes that she displayed. You will also have. So genotype is what you’ve got. Phenotype is what you see. So it wouldn’t show the genotype but it would show at least your phenotype. I think in the farms producing the guppies, they found a way to do this easily and to get it to stick better. Guppies aren’t breeding as much as they used to. I mean, there’s still a problem, but I think it’s getting less. Those that do breed aren’t producing the same colors as the females are. They’re back to being the drab gray females. And like I say, we’re guessing these brightly colored females. And often when you look at their behavior and you look at the anal fin, which used to be an easy guide. Sometimes you get in very androgynous anal fins there. So I think they using hormones to color up the females because otherwise they’re relatively worthless. So yeah, it’s a problem, especially if you’re planning on breeding them. But there is a solution to that one. So again live fast die young strategy. It’s got its issues. They need the water to be in quite a narrow range of parameters. They need hard water. I’m not talking about reef lake levels or what mollies need, but they do need hard water. They are one of those species that struggle to get the calcium from their food, and instead need to take it in from their surrounding environments. They also struggle with high nitrates, and I wouldn’t be keeping them in anything over twenty parts per million. They also don’t have the enzymes needed to live in tannin rich environments. So if you’ve got a lot of wood in your water and it’s giving you that tea staining. Guppies don’t have the enzyme to separate tannins from the protein, which means they won’t be able to have much or any protein in their diet, but they are adapted to be detritus feeders. They need high fiber diets. They need actually relatively low nutrition. We see a lot of bloating guppies, and you normally find they’ve been on a diet of like bloodworm and rich fish food pellets, and that’s causing the issues. So try and mimic their natural diet relatively clear hard water and you’ll get a longer life out of them. Will they survive and breed in soft water rich in tannins? Yes, because if they are breathing they are breeding. That is their survival strategy. If a females with a male wants she’s popping out fry for a year afterwards, each of those in the dozens and then eight weeks later those fry will be popping out. Fry and she’s by now had two more lots of fry. And then eight weeks after that that you’re now onto generation number three and they’re popping out fry. Meanwhile, she’s had another two lots of fry. The first group have had another two lots of fry themselves. And you are getting into huge numbers staggeringly fast. And because you’re probably not selecting for the best because you’re having to let them, you’ve probably only got one tank to keep them in, so you’re just letting them breed amongst themselves. That means you’re going to get drab grey fish, especially if we take in the hormonal mixes into it and you can’t sell them. And that’s the big problem. And that, I think, is the main reason why I said, I don’t think guppies make great pets for the aquarium. Great aquarium fish because they breed too readily and too frequently. But I love them. Really. It’s one of those things. And I’m going to mention what I think is the worst thing about them. They are bred in their thousands because they need to come to the to your local fish store for pennies and that’s going to include shipping. So I mean, like even the most expensive wholesalers. Last time I checked, we were talking like seventy eighty for a guppy. Now, that’s not bad for an animal that’s just been flown in from the Far East or from South America. I mean, let’s be completely honest, airfreight is not cheap. And that guppy and the water surrounding it and all that sort of thing has just been flown in. You’ve got all the paperwork to get them into the country then, you know, probably taken through a wholesaler. Yeah, there’s lots of steps. And what that means is the person breeding them isn’t getting very much at all for that guppy. So they are not just cutting the odd corner, they are cutting every corner possible. They are feeding them on the cheapest rubbish possible. They are breeding them in huge ponds that are open to the elements and are getting all sorts of parasites. And from one farm, a study found almost half the fish had camallanus worms and Camallanus worms are a bugger to treat and it’s not cheap. Treating all these things we’ve seen, there’s an outbreak of columnaris going on around, and it’s across enough fish that I think it’s probably come in via a wholesaler or one big breeding farm. But yeah, we’ve got a really nasty outbreak of columnaris going around. Uh. Camallanus worms is showing up in quite a few guppies. It’s not cheap to treat these things, especially when you might lose your stock. You might have to throw up substrate, all this sort of thing. It’s it’s prevention is better than cure. Most definitely. But you can get really great quality guppies that raised without hormones if you breed them and try and cull the worst of them, or at least remove them from the breeding pool. You’ll probably be able to sell them at least your LFS. Talk to them first. Don’t just turn up with a load of guppies, but talk to them. Say that you’re going to probably do a breeding project with a particular strain, and they’re often say they’re willing to take them. They might not pay you for them, but they will take them. Um, and that’s because there’s a whole host of guppie clubs and fancy breeders out there, including Guppy Keepers Society UK, who recently had a talk by yours truly. Yeah, it’s going to take a bit more time. You’re going to have to, you know, join the club and go there. So and the fish themselves are going to cost more. I think I bought my last pair about fifteen quid for the pair. And I’ve had some of you go. How much. Yeah. But that was really good quality fish, well bred. They had a particular genetic line, well worth the money. But also you know what, I think going to the shows and meeting people who’ve produced your very fish is one of the best parts about Fishkeeping certainly is for me. So that’s where I’m going to leave that one tonight. Guys, um, we are going to be back hopefully tomorrow looking at something a little bit more unusual, something that you might not see in every fish tank. So it’s probably going to be looking at grades tomorrow, but also looking at some of the projects that have been doing to get those fish back into the wild, where I think we’ll all agree is quite important for them to be. Thank you so much for joining me, guys. If you want to support us, could you please pop over to Patreon? Uh, I’ve got some things that I’m wanting to say that would probably get me demonetized. So I am going to start producing over there. I’m going to have some things, like I say some new things on the horizon. So if you want to keep in touch, please go and follow us over at tropical Fishkeeping UK on Facebook. Tropical Fishkeeping UK on Insta. Tropical Fishkeeping UK. The subreddit is over there. Uh, I think I’m just tropical fish on blue sky. I’d have to check that one. Uh, but yeah guys, you can find us in most of the places that you follow things. And thank you very much. And I will speak to you very soon.