Hi - I just signed up. I've been keeping tropicals (community tanks, mostly) since the 70's, started seriously breeding guppies when my son was small - '95-ish. The most important thing I've learned in the last 10 years is you have to start with good stock. I started with pet store fish and after 10 years of work on the pet store strain I am just beginning to see males with consistent patches of green on their tails. On the other hand, the stock I bought from breeders (Shubel and others) are bigger, healthier, more uniform genetically (no more spurts of red males seemingly out of nowhere) and I am having much better luck approaching that green color that I want. Currently I have a green delta line and a green moscow line, but the moscows are about 10% what I would call green, mostly blue with a few purples, and the delta line while a lovely green have a lop sided delta - the top half of the triangle is much longer than the bottom, leaving them looking kind of sword-tail-ish. I am actively pursuing stock for outcrossing to try to get the tail into equilateral triangle shape. I'm also ditching my petstore line by selling it to - you guessed it - a pet store. I also freecycled a lot of the reds (a yahoo list where you give things away free to anyone who'll come and get it) I like to think the fish I'm selling are better than the ones I originally bought.
Hello ChrisOE and welcome. I admire your remarkable patience with the pet-store line (10 years
!!) I bred a pet-store line of reds for about 4 years and although the learning experience enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable, the results were often er... how shall we say? a little disappointingly unpredictable some of the time
Where does your Moscow line originate from?
I'm trying to remember, it was a few years ago. I think I got them from Jeff Hiller, along with another line of green deltas that I folded into the Shubel blue/greens. I suspect the green issue isn't a reflection on the quality of the fish, but rather on a catastrophic bout of something that swept my fish room two years ago. It went from tank to tank before I knew it. By the time I had things under control (bleached everything that could be bleached, culled any fish that showed any signs of illness) I was left with a perfectly nice set of moscows and deltas that had been selected for disease resistance rather than for color.
I think the Delta tail shape problem comes that, and from a female I had (a daughter of the Hiller deltas) who was very prolific (frequent 40+ drops), had great big fry and and was good sized herself, and who was very broody - she would just sit and watch her babies swim by. They hardly needed protection at all. Due to her breeding success her genes have come to predominate in the green line and she did have a top heavy tail. It is tempting to cross her offspring because of their good color and large size, but the tail thing needs to be sorted out. As I said, still a beginner in a lot of ways. I am looking foward to a delivery of Florida Blue Giants (Luis Tammarelle) which I hope to use to help with size and tail shape. (They are from his green giant line, so apparently they have those green genes, they're just not coming out on top. I hope to get some greens out of a cross)
I am chanting my mantra: quarantine quarantine quarantine I so do not want to have the disease drama repeat itself. Oh, and I disinfect all my nets now, whether they need it or not.
Wow you've been around the breeding block a lot longer than I have. At least the petstore fish are good for practice.
I'm a freecycler too, its good stuff.