Guppy Fish and Their Colour Variation

This piece is in evolution.

Colour Variation in Guppy Fish.

No two Guppy Fish looks the same is my observation. That is polysomy as regards to colour pattern.

This is an important topic for genetic study.

It is mainly determined by 

Y Chromosome

Father son relationship

Mainly determine lines and spots and colour distribution.

Mating habits and fertility 

X Chromosome

X Chromosome in the female probably nullfy the effects of  Y Chromosome.

This is why Female Guppy is almost clourless

This is evolutionary adaptation.

The male is sacrificed and female is saved in the wild from predators. Over time male also lose colour except lines and spots.

Polysomy is the result.

Epitaxis is one gene that determine the behavior of another gene.

Autosomes

Autosomes determine the dark (blue) and orange colour.

Melanophores and Xanthophores are pigment type.

Pigmentation in humans deretmined by Melanophores was my interest as a Pathology Teacher.

Read my piece here on this blogspot.

Even though Guppy fish my lifetime interest I never bothered to investigate genetics at that time. 

Genetics was biased towards human diseases and it was boring in 1960s.

Population genetics was not studied and came into prominance in 1980s.

Linkage Pattern 

Ultimately pattern of gene linkage determines the overall colour and without any studies I could fathom that two Guppy Fish are not of the same colour by very simple observation.

Of course I was involved in mixing Guppy Fish in my big and small tanks over 40 years and that is why understanding colour pattern of Guppy Fish in natural to me.

Blind Fish
I volunteered to look after a batch of blind and partially blind fish.
After nearly 20 months only three are left.
One has total visually capacity now.
One is blind in one eye.

The other is totally blind.
It amazes me how it survived.
 
It more amazing how it detects me.
 
The moment I sit next to the tank it comes near to the side my chair is kept.

The blind fish knows I am there.
 
I do not touch anything.
Probably it detects my foot steps and pulling the chair (gently).
I do not feed that tank (to confuse the blind fish in a way) first as a routine but feed the fish in the main big tank.
 
Moment I start putting the pellets that sink to the bottom, the two clown fish make a mess of the bottom sediment, and then the blind fish hits at the bottom or the floor in a random fashion and finds its food.
That's how it survived.
I believe the other fish, especially the clown fish (scavenger) gives a subsonic message to the blind fish.
They are all in one community.

Goby Fish

Goby fish is an ugly fish. Small in size similar to Guppy fish but live in both fresh and sea water. I have not seen one live. They type that live in mangroves slide into tunnels made by crabs on mangrove roots with the sliding tides. There are tiny octopuses who feed on these fish. 

The ecosystems in mangroves is unique. Our mangroves in the Negambo, Ceylon is fast receding.

 Zebra Fish and Black Guppy
I have reason to believe there is unhealthy practices of Fish Breeding.
I may have briefly mentioned this sometime in the past. I cannot trace the piece of writing.
In any case there seems to be new developments.
There is a guy who breeds albino zebras.
He has now introduced a pink strain.
I have an obsession on the topic of pigmentation, especially in regard to Guppy fish.
I wished as a kid, I could see a Guppy black like a black molly.
A guy in Thibirigasya, actually accomplished it.
He deserves a Nobel Prize.
I do not know how he accomplished it but to see a Guppy with band of black is common now.
These Guppies are robust, healthy and of reasonable size.
But all the variants of Zebras were tiny.
They do not grow to adult size in spite of proper feeding.
They do not mix in the shoal with normally colored zebras.
In other words they were unhealthy.
 

 Albino Tetras

Toady, I received a batch of albino tetras free of charge from a dealer, whom I knew for two decades.
The idea was for me to look after them (confirmed disabled) sympathetically until they die.
One of them died on transit due to shock.
Rest went into panic state the moment, I introduced them to my main tank.
I sat there and watched their agony for half an hour.
Only two recovered in half an hour.
Most of them were partially blind or an eye was totally missing.
One was totally blind and took the longest to recover.
After one hour all of them could balance and swim in a comical manner.
They had two problems.
One was blindness.
The other was balancing.
I believe these strains are poisoned in their breeding.
They must be using very toxic material.
There is unsupervised breeding programs in this country.
These chemical are hazardous to humans and other animals and are slowly percolating into our ground water.
Who is allowing these materials to be imported?
That is my big question.

Zebra Experiment

I bought the zebra fish with an intention of crossbreeding them.

They are easy to breed but one need an elaborate tanks to separate the eggs from the parents and also have adequate quantity of infusoria.

Infusoria

Infusoria grows naturally in most tanks, particularly those with live plants. However, there may not be sufficient quantities to sustain a full hatching of fry.
The term infusoria is an old one that has changed in meaning over the years. 

At one time it referred to just about any microscopic, or nearly microscopic, organism that lived in fresh water. That use of that word long ago became outdated in the scientific community.
However, the term infusoria is still used by many within the aquarium community, even by younger fish enthusiasts. To aquarium enthusiasts infusoria refers to many small organisms in water that tiny fry can feed up upon.
Although it's not feasible to name every organism that could be in an infusoria culture, some of the primary ones include, algae (volvox), amoebae, euglena, paramecium, rotifers, stentor and vorticella.

Therefore, it is helpful to culture your own infusoria to ensure having an adequate amount.

Zebra Fish Breeding
Nature has lot of surprises for you and me.
I was trying to raise a Guppy fish with swordtail for ages.
It was easy in good old days when the brood was wild.
They did not have the present sailtail (Sary Guppy) then.
But with the breeding of exotic and the emergence of the sail-tail or sari-tail varieties of guppies one cannot find guppies with the narrow short dorsal end of the tail with a broader and longer ventral end.
I have been screening the tails of guppies and found one with the suggestion of a swordtail and I mixed that one with the wild (not really wild) looking with light featured female guppies but there is no success yet.
They breed less in the glass tanks.
I am waiting for a miracle to happen.
But toady, I was doing my daily routine of mixing different batches of guppies to interbreed and quite casually looked at the fortuitous zebra breeding tank to see whether the water quality was OK.
This plastic kitchen sink type of container was designed to put zebras to lay eggs and in my opinion it was not ready yet to put the adults. But as a conditioning routine I load it with the first portion of outlet water bucket from my main tank with zebras. Idea was to build the infusoria for the young ones, if they lay eggs by any chance. These eggs are very small and not visible to the naked eye. Most of it is eaten by the adult males and adult males are necessary for the fertilization of eggs.  

They lay over 400 to 1000 eggs but rarely a few survives in the tank. 

By removing water at the bottom by siphoning, I expect few eggs by chance to remain trapped with fortuitous black fungus (which appear like a tuft of leaves when fully grown).
Fish do not eat this black fungus probably it has nasty taste or alelopathic chemical.

Then in the main tank to clown fish do the cleaning up of the eggs no sooner they are laid. 

I have been doing this religiously for the last one year but without any luck.
My first batch of zebra (breeding) was discovered accidentally in a bucket with water plants left to nature.
I had about 20 odd young ones and introduced 16 to the main tank leaving behind only four in the original bucket. 

That was a shear intelligent decision the ones introduced to the tank (fairly big) were eaten by the adult in one night.
They are very good at population control of their kind.
I wonder how they survive in the nature.
Probably the adult die soon after breeding with endemic parasitic diseases.
To my surprise there were six young one in the plastic container that survived the natural population control. Now I cannot put siphoned water to this tank for at least six months since they (young zebras) will eat all the eggs. 

I have to leave them in series of buckets and I have no room in my rooftop garden for any more buckets. So my zebra breeding will have to be done on makeshift containers. I cannot put the six young zebra fish to the main tank with zebras (they will be eaten) or to the other tank with live bearers. 

Young zebras will eat all the live-bearers’ young ones.
It is a paradox and reproducing nature is only an ad hoc experiment.

In a different note, I have a fabricated rainfall detector (modified fish tank) and it recorded half an inch of rain for the last one week. 

That I think is 25% of the usual rainfall and my predictions are we will have a drought by next April.

 

Guppy Fish

I have a life long relationship with Guppy Fish.

I grew up with them.

 

They taught me biology without having to read a textbook.

What I discovered was Guppy fish suffers from a disease called Guppy Disease.

I have a healthy batch of almost wild Guppy stock. 

They are in my big outdoor fish tanks.

Those tanks are meant to control mosquito population. 

Guppy fish love mosquito larvae even though they do not kill other fish.

They are called community fish since they live in harmony with other type of fish.

Most important thing one has to do is to quarantine the new batch of fish.

I have a quarantine tank.

They are kept there until they breed. Breeding is a good sign of healthy fish.

The new shoal is transferred to a new tank and once they are big a sample is put to the outdoor tank.

Since, I follow this routine regimentally, I never had an episode of Guppy Disease.

I used to release some of them to the streams nearby.

I stopped doing this die to a good reason.

 

We tend to release washing machine discard to our stream.

The chemicals used in washing cloths cause gill disease and 90% fish released die. 

That was not acceptable to me.

Humans are the ones who poison our environment on daily basis.

 

Guppy Disease

 Guppy fish used to be my favourite but now my interest is water plants especially water lilies.
But one cannot have a pond without fish.
The mosquitoes would take over in no time.
Guppy fish is the only solution.
 

But over time the fish lose their bright colours and become the wild type. The wild type is resistant to disease.
 
Just to introduce some colours I bought a batch of bright coloured guppies.
Knowing very well they are incubating guppy disease I introduced them to the stock tank.
I added few of my wild guppy to interbreed.
In no time one by one all the guppies started dying.
Not other fish types.
It was evident that the guppy disease was the cause.
I believe it is a virus disease and over time they become resistant.
But unfortunately my fish in the main outdoor tank started dying.
I made sure there was no contact or contamination.
I was puzzled and worried the fish food was the cause.
 

I need to work on this.
The vendors treat these disease fish before selling.
Within 24 hours they show the signs of disease and start dying.

 
If you buy a new stock do not introduce them to your main tank.
 

Observe them in a hospital tank for at least a week.
Treat them if necessary and introduce only the healthy ones.

 
Ideally the next generation of young fish.

 
If they are healthy they breed and breed fast.
 

You have a healthy batch then.
 

I now think even contaminated fish food carry disease if not guppy disease (viral) but by bacterial disease.
 

Fish do not have a well developed immune system and succumb to diseases especially bacterial.
 

So keeping the tanks in good healthy condition is a priority.
 

Every time one introduces new fish this risk is increased or multiplied.

 

Over the years, I became a water plant addict and I had 22 types of water plants.

I did not know their names.

Then I moved to lily plants. 

I had about 8 to 10 varieties with beautiful flowers. 

Two of them propagated by pollen and they were the most delicate. Others had yams and propagating them was easy.

I wait for them to blossom. 

If you touch them they go into hibernation.

No flowers.

One of them never blossomed after 15 years. That is what called long hibernation.

 

Finally I moved to caring for orchids. 

We had a big orchid house when I was young. 

What happened to it was very sad story, I would not expand.

 

Within five years I manged to collect 11 or 12.

Beauty is many of them start flowering.

 

I left them on our rooftop garden.

 

I am pretty sure most of them are already stolen. The roof on one end is low and the Rewla (bearded guy) on the neighboring land is the most likely candidate.

 

I kept guppy fish to control mosquitoes.

 

I will encourage the misquotes to breed in my water buckets. Then add two or three guppy fish when the bucket is full of larvae. The water buckets have enough water plants and Vallisneria. Vallisneria (named in honour of Antonio Vallisneri) is a genus of freshwater aquatic plant, commonly called eel grass, tape grass or vallis. 

Of course, I cannot use water plants as vegetables. 

I am trying to find a water plant that may prevent mosquito breeding.

I gave up fish keeping when I started aging. Changing water in fish tank was not easy. I had a separate water tank for fish tanks to get rid of chlorine in water.

I disposed all my water tanks. 

And kept a healthy stock of guppy fish.

I am now in Australia and do not consider starting the hobby again.

Give you few tips about Guppy fish later.

 The Paddy Field, the ecosystem and the sick man

The Paddy Field, the ecosystem and the sick man.
I never bothered to work out the ecosystem built around the paddy field.
My first impression is that they are vanishing fast due to wrong agricultural practice and use of uncensored variety of chemicals and fertilizers.
I used to release my excess load of guppy fish to the streams and paddy fields but have stopped doing that since, my gut feeling is that they would not survive.

Interestingly only water loving plant not in my water garden is paddy.
I dismiss paddy as a highly customized and manipulated plant for commercial use and has no value to nature except pollution and more pollution.
It is not a natural plant in a giant ecosystem.
I natural pant does not need any human intervention.

My neighbourhood is a good example of what is happenning to the paddy fields.

There was a stretch of paddy land between the road and the railway line.

Now there is line of newly built houses where most of the paddy fields were.

It an offence to fill up paddy fields and built houses according to the law but with Chinthanaya holding its forte, every little law related to paddy cultivation was violated over the last 10 years.

In actual fact over the last 25 years.

If you neglect a paddy field it does not regenerate its ecosystem and blossom into a water garden with water lilies all over the place.

If there is no water it goes into a utterly useless wasteland.

One cannot make it to a proper and viable vegetable garden.

The in between land is worse, they become breeding ground for various mosquitoes not only dengue.

When we moved into our present location, the mosquito menace was immense.

We could not sleep without mosquito nets.

Then we went abroad for few years and when we returned, I made a resolve to make our current location 80% mosquito free.

I have listed them elsewhere from education to simple techniques (no need any repetition here) and we have achieved it.

Suffice is to say, the filling up of the paddy lands did help a lot but now we are left with dengue.

Dengue mosquitoes thrive on urban on semi-urban environment.

My bone of contention was and is even toady is that most of the mosquitoes breed in the cesspit.

Coming back to the paddy lands that are presently cultivated, there are only two left.

One looked after by a woman.

The other looked after by a man who worked in the university.
I was very friendly with him and he followed a somewhat scientific approach and the woman followed the traditional method.

The paddy land of the woman is above the paddy land of the man and it gets the water first but this clever guy always beats her and always cultivate paddy a few weeks before the woman.
This I have observed and was very careful not to raise my eyes and pose a question knowing there was subtle competition.
The other subtle point is the guy gets the benefit of the fertilizer seepage towards the latter half of the growth and it is almost free.

These are little things one has to observe but no detective work should be carried out.

Mind your business attitude.

This week I noticed she for the first time beat the guy up well and truly.

So I paused a bit and went into pensive mode.

I pretended to be observing the two king fishers on the power line.

There were two almost flightless birds (who nest on marshland left by uncultivated paddy lands) on the paddy field that has being prepared.

I came home and decided list the animals.

The fish (hardly any), crabs, king fisher trail was obvious.
Water snakes, frogs, toads and insects were in the other trail.
Mind you all the toads and frogs visit my fish tanks not civets.
I do not interfere.
This is something I missed in my little piece.

My contribution to the ecosystem.
But then I remembered this guy telling me that there are little mice that damage the plant when young and also when the seeding begins.

The fact, I did not know that this was the mouse or the rat that spread leptospirosis.

I did not see him for few weeks.

Is he down with leptospirosis?

Is he having kidney ailment?

Those were the questions that spontaneously ran through my mind. 

 

He was OK and I met him in the city of Kandy tow years later.

The land was sold to anther guy and he did not re-knew his lease.

 

It has become a waste land now.

Land ownership and "Ande" still works in Ceylon.

 

Fishing a Guppy Fish
Fishing a Guppy Fish out of misery is not easy, especially if it jumped out into the cement floor of the rooftop garden (from a water plant pot).
Let me start with saying that my major interest is water plants.
I breed guppies only to control mosquito menace.
I am successful up to 90% of the time, after many years of trial and error.
Mosquitoes do lay eggs, but they are cleaned up by guppies, when I do not feed them, one day out of 10 days.
Roughly 10^th day they come out as larvae, quickly to be devoured by hungry guppies.
Water plants grow fast when there are lot of fish adequately fed.
Their urine is my fertilizer especially for the lilies.
Toady I pulled out the Japanese water fern in excess to give more freedom for the guppies to swim and one accidentally jumped out.
Once they are on the cement floor catching them is not easy.
One cannot hand pick.
If you do that one squeezes the kidneys and they die within 24 hours.
I quickly dam the drainage outlet of the cement floor with water plants (growing out of the top of the containers).
If you don't the fish reaches the drainage pipe by default (it follows the water flow by instinct) and gone in few minutes never to find again.
I open the tap in full throttles and look around to see where the guy/girl is?
It is often very difficult to find and it is in panic mode anyway.
Once found I pick them with a leave made into a funnel with little water at the bottom.
It took over 10 minutes to locate it but quickly cornered it and landed it on its rightful place.
My cascading principle of letting water into the next pot of plant at a lower level works most of the time for wondering fish but not when one takes a mighty flying jump.
Even though, I used to enjoy a fish soup instead of wine now, seeing a fish in death dance is painful experience.
Every day, I see fish (fresh water fish) vendors selling live fish (from Mahaveli River) just out of water from the river or pond.
This city is called Kandy.
Mind you the magpie (local singing bird) steals my guppies every day.
Being a bird lover growing lilies (the leaves are a cover for the fish) has its own surprises. 

 

Ornamental Threatened Fish in Ceylon 

I was a avid fish keeper with over 20 to 40 little and big glass tanks and two cement ponds. 

Gouramis and Zebra fish were my interests.

I thought we had only a few endemic fish types.

Giant Danios in Hantana Stream and Rosy Barbs in Matale and Galagedera streams in Upcountry were the one two I did know.

I am told there are over 100 endemic species in the West Zone.

Quickly I became an Environmentalist and strongly opposed fish vendors selling local species except for those who are empowered to breed them and release them back to the wild.

I turned only to water plants especially lilies and Guppy fish.

I use guppy fish to control mosquitoes and periodically release them to the local streams.

Guppy fish is not an endemic species.

The biggest danger to guppy fish is the use of Washing Machines which releases large quantities of toxic material which are toxic to the gills (breathing apparatus).

Once the gills ate damaged there is no recovery.

I forgot to put an entry in Road Maps for Ceylon, on our ornamental fish. I am going to rectify it immediately.

Saving our Endemic Ornamental Fish

The biggest danger is the Fresh Water Aquariums and foreign species of Scavenger fish. 

They either escape from aquariums inadvertently or are released deliberately (feeding them with guppy fish I abhor) due to economic reasons of not being able to feed them.

With economic downturn keeping ornamental fish is a luxury in Ceylon.

When the imported fish food went up, I moved to guppy fish who need minimum of care and they rarely become carnivorous.

Before I left Ceylon I put a couple of beautiful guppies in a plastic tank with lot of water plants expecting the plants to retain water (I was expecting to return home in 3 months) in the tank without drying up.

I think the tank may have dried up in no time.

The plastic tank or box was the one I used to care for injured birds and animals.

With air fare going up an election covering the holiday season, it is Good Bye to Mother Lanka.

I honestly, do not believe there going to be any recovery in a foreseeable future.

Politics in not my domain but philosophy is. 

I am currently working on a book of  "Betrayal of Philosophy".

I could not find the book on Das Capital by Carl Marx after 10 years of searching.

Strangely, an incident yesterday in West Coast made me to blow up mildly. 

Real details withheld.

 

This incident does not warrant a single blog piece.

We were about to get into our car and three women one white, one mixed African descent and one of Chinese stock approached us, in reality bold incursion, wanted to recite the Bible to us. 

They did not ask what our religion is, which should be the normal protocol of any bold incursion.

They kept on reading the Bible ad nauseam.

After a while, I said "It is time up" and we are Buddhists and we do not believe in God (did not say your God).

Then the Chinese one in turn asked who is your God and I turned a sarcastic gesture and said, "I can be Nasty' and they disappeared.

I suppose this is a good entry point to my book on "Philosophy Betrayed".

What had happened to "Freedom of Thought" in the 21st century?

Are we still slaves to dogma, faith, belief, a mad conviction to a band of religion or War in the name of Pseudo Gods, in the Middle East?

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Right for Life

Introduction is lengthy but latter part is spicy.

My philosophy is masterly inactivity as far as the mother nature is concerned.

Another idea that springs out of that philosophy is, every life form has the right to live its entire life cycle without hindrance.

Unlike in Buddhism I have extended it to the plant family taking a cue from Darwin.

So killing life (not plants) for food, I abhor.

This has nothing to do with religion and like human rights there should be animal rights not only for cats and dogs (what about chickens, almost flightless bird).

Now with the rain coming in and not enough sunlight shining down catastrophe was about to hit my guppy fish population.

I have had enough past experience.

I lost almost entire population of Green Swordtails.

My first interest is not fish keeping but looking after water plants which has extended to water lilies.

I keep fish to control mosquitoes.

That has given me lot of problems.

When they start dying, they die in large numbers, since they do not have a powerful immune response.

So, I decided to use the air compressor for two fish tanks (instead of one) using a T connector but that piece of Chinese T connector (unlike coming from the West) did not work even for a week and the fish start showing signs of ill health.

Sure enough they started dying.

I gave up fish keeping totally, except guppies.

Immediately removed the ill functioning T connector and used a spare air compressor to pump air to the second tank.

 

This Chinese made air copressor had two outlets but only one would work after six months.

Even the death of fish touches my heart (I go into overdrive).

That is the entry point for the spicy stuff.

While I was attending to the fish tank, wife came and showed me a photograph of the garden created at the site of Bogambara Prison Complex.

This was built by the British, and I hated it from my school days and I voiced an opinion that it should be removed forthright (a prime land in the center of the City).

Nobody cared to remove it for over 65 years.

It was an eyesore.

I visited this place with the first opportunity I had.

One of my friends became the Prison doctor who had to certify the death of the prisoner (he hated the job within few months- he wanted to stay in Kandy) after execution.

If I remember right Somarama (not sure) and Maru Sira were executed there.

It was an appalling site to wonder around.

I told my wife just imagine the plight of the prisoner there waiting for execution.

Can a true Buddhist watch an execution?

Our current (probably future presidents,too) can do that without revulsion.

I will never visit this park and I do bypass this track if I have to visit the hospital.

It reminds me of the painful past at first site which no one can erase with rose buds on plant beds.

Nobody has the right to kill any living being.

It is bordering psychopathy.