Welcome to GuppyLog.com
New to Guppylog?
Immediate Help


Conversions and Calculator
Conversions and Tank volume calculator


Add yourself to our guppylog map
Guppylog Members


* Change as much water as often as you can! *
Inkmaker
Front Page · Everything · News · Ask Guppylog · Diaries
Display: Sort:
3 way swordtail fight | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
Re: Are you sure that she was a functional male? (none / 0) (#4)
by josh117 on Thu Jun 19, 2008 at 09:59:28 PM PST

I was never sure she was functional, i never saw it move, but my lyretail male is constantly trying to breed with my 2 female neons, i thought that livebearers shot the sperm outside of the female like next to the anal fin and only some sperm got in, but thats what brought the idea of trimming his gonopodium to somewhat regular size would hopefully help with, i used to have a male variatus platy that had a gravid spot and always tried to breed with my male red wag swordtail O_o but he eventually died but he did have kids though, 1 regular male and 1 regular female and a hi fin female because the mother was a hi fin blue platy and he was my only variatus, and my only platy because he killed the red wag like 2 months before that, and thats also when i found my miniature green swordtails.

[ Parent ]


The trimming of the extended gonopodium (none / 0) (#5)
by unclescott on Fri Jun 20, 2008 at 07:07:43 AM PST

is an very creative consideration. However each species has a (bad pun) specific shape to the gonopodium, with certain arrangement of fin rays, hooks and angles. Indeed taxonomists use the shape of the gononpodium to determine what species a fish is. And female Poeciliids have a vent, which is designed to only accept the gonopodia of their species. Sometimes, closely related species are able to sometimes cross because of similar gononpodiums. That is why, after a lot of trying in labs, several Xiphophorus (swordtails, platys, variatus and judging by a recent ALA issue of Livebearers even more species recently) have been crossed.

Miniature green swordtails? One of the interesting thing about both wild and domestic swordtails from X. helleri is that they will throw smaller males, who mostly spawn by "sneak spawning" and also throw the larger "super-males". In some cases, especially where there are a lot of efficient predators, the fast maturing smaller males may be essential if the females are to be inseminated and the species will survive. In other circumstances there is a survival advantage to the larger males.

The other thing is that if we crowd the young swords they will not grow as fast. At a certain time, it is almost like there was a timer in each male and they will begin to develop a sword and pretty much stop growing. We have several male swordtails (both because of crowding and just because they were the smaller ones) in a living room 40-gallon with "odd-number" rainbowfish and a four-year-old male butterfly Goodied (Ameca splendens). Back in the swordtail tank, the females get the larger swordtail male. Usually the biggest male swordtail would be the bully in the 40. In that case the Goodied in the 40 is a pretty aggressive fish, but there are so many tank mates, enough space and quite of bit of foliage to shelter in that nobody is dinged up or chewed. I also quite using a feeding ring, allowing food to spread out more - and that spread out the feeding fish too.

Below are some images of various reproductive organs. The last article compares anal fins of the Poeciliid family (or sub-family) and one of the Goodieds. You can see why the Goodieds can more easily cross.

http://labs.eeb.utoronto.ca/rodd/courses.htm

http://www.scielo.sa.cr/scielo.php?pid=S0034-77442002000300032&script=sci_arttext

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.livingfish.co.uk/livebearers/images/gonopodium.gif &imgrefurl=http://www.livingfish.co.uk/livebearers/whatlive.htm&h=126&w=255&sz=6& ;hl=en&start=26&tbnid=c-PxC6UL77_JXM:&tbnh=55&tbnw=111&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgonopo dium%26start%3D20%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

[ Parent ]



Re: The trimming of the extended gonopodium (none / 0) (#6)
by josh117 on Fri Jun 20, 2008 at 10:27:16 AM PST

My red wag swordtail died yesterday, he was a father of 30 and soon to be more, but it looks like my poor lyretail will never have kids, and what about the molly, platy cross breed, ive seen a few of those but i se no resemblance in the gonopodiums, and my guppy/molly cross has a very deformed one and has a swim bladder problem to where he sways when he swims, the head of it looks more molly but when you get to the back of the body he has the body of a female guppy with a few small scattered spots, this is a very weird fish, i might try and take pictures of it. Last year i had a big spawn of black swordtails, i had one male live out of the ones i kept and it was a super male because of the green swordtail that i still had, he became bigger than his mom he was very huge. I was also wondering, are we going through an albino koi and black swordtail shortage this year, i cant find them anywhere and they can't get them in for me. well they got 1 albino koi in but it was very small and they were going to charge me $10 for it.

[ Parent ]


Please do take a photo of what you believe to be (none / 0) (#7)
by unclescott on Sat Jun 21, 2008 at 07:05:45 AM PST

the Guppy/molly cross. Can you document who the parents were? Such crosses seem to have happened, but are very rare. Can you demonstrate that that fish is not just the product of two molly strains (or even two molly species) mating?

"what about the molly, platy cross breed, ive seen a few of those". Sigh! I feel like such a mean-spirited cynic asking this, but has anyone else, anywhere in the world, seen such a cross? Ever?

Again, can you document who the parents were? Can you demonstrate that the fish(es) in hand are not a molly x molly or platy x some Xiphophorus product or just a miss-identified fish??

In light of previous discussions, just pulling some fry from a large community of livebearers and christening them a cross of two species does not prove that the fish is/are an actual cross. One must be able to demonstrate that the parents are properly identified and isolated. (Possibly we could work backwards, if we had the capacity to take a tail snipping and analyze the DNA of the possible parental species and the youngsters.) The parents must also breed true, as opposed to producing mystery fry because they had been inseminated by parties unknown at a shop. And before we declare a fry the offspring of two parents, we must be able to eliminate the possibility of any other fish being one of those parents.

When you declared that you were getting guppy X Gambusia crosses, it was noticed that you had breeding pairs of guppies and Gambusia in the same aquarium. Because females of both species were dropping fry in that aquarium doesn't mean that one can claim that one female was dropping both guppy and Gambusia fry.

In some course somewhere, a text's author was talking about how we can drawn false or irrelevant conclusions from data uncritically compared. As an example it was pointed out by someone many years ago that a large urban area might have a number of criminals plying their trade there. It was also noticed that there were a number of ministers in that city. The author somewhat jovially noted that someone had come to the goof-ball conclusion that if there are a number of ministers in an area there would also be a number of law breakers in that area!

That false reasoning overlooks the fact that the urban area might be home to millions of people. Many of those individuals might have largely different life styles and never meet someone or at least get to know others well, who have such different priorities and ways of "making a living."

[ Parent ]



3 way swordtail fight | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
Display: Sort:

Menu

· create account

· F.A.Q. For Newbies!

· Immediate Help For Newbies!

· search


Web www.guppylog.com

· Scoop Info

· Our Tanks

Login
Make a new account
Username:
Password:

SourceForge Logo Powered by Scoop
Subscribe to our news feed
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 2002 and beyond The Management

create account | faq | search