I recently discovered a specialty shop in my town, called Guppykan. It specializes in guppies and other related species of Poecilia and Micropoecilia. This shop has cultivated and wild varieties of guppies, Endler's, branneri and picta. An excellent shop, but the prices are out of this world. A pair of solid red veiltail guppies with a solid, deep, rich red colour expressed over the 100% of the body of the male and 50% of the female's body was worth 425,000 yen (approximately $230). A pair of non-hybrid merald green lyretail endler's wasn't that much cheaper.
A person on another e-mail list brought attention to the photography of Kenjiro Tanaka. Kenjiro and I almost completed a fish trade many years ago.
He went on to become an accomplished aquatic photographer, no thanks to me. ;)
If you go to
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/medaka-ken/k.t/framepage4.html
take a gander at the guppy photos (just ignore those ugly killies and anabandids) you will notice that Japanese aquarists seem to appreciate patterns of guppies different from what most American guppy fanatics raise.
If you click on the next and back buttons and the link boxes to the left, you will find several other pages of wonderful photos. I'm guessing the fish portrayed are typical of what is in the Japanese hobby. There are other Japanese sites which feature deltatails however.
See also numbers 1 to 10 at
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/medaka-ken/k.t/framepage5.html
Some of those pages look like they might be posters, perhaps for sale. Probably one could e-mail him and ask for details in English. (I do have one of his posters - of different material - framed and under glass on the wall in the fish room.)
I don't think you will go anywhere which would get you in trouble or obligated to purchase anything on those pages though. ;)
Americans have been accused of being preoccupied with size as opposed to other characteristics of fish and other things. It is interesting how a people's culture will influence even their aquatic passions. In the land where bonsai trees were developed, (space is often at a premium in Japan) strains of small, incredibly beautiful guppies are not entirely a surprise.
I've heard that European aquarists, although they appreciate deltatails, are also more interested in the various swordtail and pintail guppies than Americans.
An impressive links page from Germany, which I've not followed extensively is
http://www.world-guppy.de/english/links.html
I would be interested in what observations others of you, certainly Erdemozkanyou and Leon, have made concerning interests in other countries and cultures.
Thanks and
Immediate Help
