So I am somehow hardcoded that breeding a generation or two in my tanks doesn’t feel like I have my own strain. With this attitude I have started working with silverado. Back then available in Poland only as a wingei alike strains with little or no domesticated guppies blood.
So two first generations I have focused mainly on improving body shape and size with little attention to tail fin. From every drop I have choosen only 2, 3 the biggest males. And cross them to the fancy swordtail guppy female. I also payed a lot of attention to dorsal fin. From my previous crosses it was obvious that I don’t wat to loose coloration of dorsal fin. Once lost it is extremely difficult to breed it back to the line without compromising other fins coloration and shape.
For initial crossess I have used swordtail females. I really didn’t want to bother with tail fin shape too much at the begining of the work. So first few generations males were mostly lower swordish.
Further outcrossess payed off with even better body shape and size. Also some individuals started to show some bigger sword alike extensions.
Some of males were really beautifull. And swords were looking more and more promising.
At this point I decided fancy guppy silverado has good shape and size and can be crossed to delta tail type. For adding nice tails I have choosen moscow female.
And a halfblack guppy female.
I liked halfblack guppy outcross results better so males from moscow guppy cross were discared. Notice some coloration on pectoral fins. At this point I gave whole line to a friend who did a good job for carring for them. This year I took one male back. It was strange looking mosaic boy with acceptable size and rather poor finnage. Carrying also what seems to be Ivory gene. I wanted to continue halfblack silverado guppy line so I crossed him back to my halfblack line with high hopes of colors on pectoral fins as I became obsessed with gullwings guppies. I have choosen the female very carefully. The one with most color on pectoral fins.
The results of this cross were astonishing, far beyond expectations.
At this point I decided to improve this line to some kind of gullwing silverado guppy phenotype.
There is one very frequent phenomena within this line of silverado guppy. Other breeders are reporting similar observations. So it seems to be a repeatable pattern within silverado domesticated lines. From time to time some males seem to loose silver forebody coloration. Is it a crossing over? Who knows. Probability for it is extremely low. Yet as silverado get more and more domesticated and frequent outcrossess to bigger guppies won’t be needed sooner or later we will get some answers. Should X linked silverado individual pop around somewhere if it is a crossing over event? Even with so low probability of success in crossing over process in my opinion it will happen sooner than later. Silverado guppy is beautiful and seems to gain in popularity in Asian breeders very fast. They have the chances to hit this X. It is worth noticing that 2-3 males guppies in every generation in my tanks loose silver forebody. In the meantime let’s just enjoy some oddball males from mine silverado guppy line.
Lessons learnt from seven generations of crossess? Now I would start from crossing to halfblack females guppies from the beginning. That way I could work on body size and shape and pay attention to tail fin size from the beginning of a process. Also one friend has reported strange phenomena. He get decently sized male with acceptable fin shape in first generation of cross to hb female. Why halfblack guppy? Well… it is another story but historically looking first fully colored tail fins ever produced were related to what we call now halfblack guppies. So theoretically it is a line of fancy guppies that has the longest positive selection towards great tail fin and body shape, analogically with mosaic phenotypes. So that’s why to cross with wild type fish in my opinion we should use the best phenotypes we have :).
