At a FAAS convention, livebearer guru James Langhammer cautioned about crossing albino guppy strains because he felt that different strains might actually have somewhat different genetic combinations behind the albinism of the strains. He felt that the careful selection of the strongest males and females and line breeding of that albino strain were the best ways to strengthen one's albino guppies. Naturally he would recommend backcrossing the two or four lines of those every so many generations.
So geo's observation that they are a mutant (like double sword guppies, veiltail guppies, black mollies, gold guppies and so on) is true. However they can be fixed.
guppybreeder3313's question about can your compel guppies to "have" albinos is interesting. Unless you are trying to hit your guppies with radiation, you are not likely to speed up the process. (And that may not work anyway.) ;)
Langhammer mentioned that albinism is not all that unusual in nature. Every so many thousand or tens of thousand offspring will produce an albino. Predators will usually consume the odd colored animal very quickly. Albinios (sort of like black angelfish) are also prone towards being less hardy than the other animals in that species.
Backcrossing that albino (aa) to a sibling (GG) will produce a gray generation (Ga). If those are bred one should get 25% GG, 50% Ga, and 25% aa which will "fix" the albino. (Angelee, did I get that right?)
If the strain of albinos is still weak, they could be back crossed to robust gray guppies in their ancestral strain. Those could then be taken through that two generation process to produce another pure aa strain.
Or if Maggie were to only have an albino male, she actually could go to the trouble of crossing them into another line of fancy guppies and working, working ,working to fix the albino color - and probably the more challenging task of also keeping the large deltatails of both lines.
I was really impressed by Langhammer's intimation that albinism was more common than we realize (look at the fascination with "white" tigers). I raised the question in the late `90s on the Livebearer Mailing List. "The Hammer" corrected my "every so many thousand" frequency of an albino offspring. I apologized for hearing what I wanted to hear. ;)
What was especially neat was that a pretty extensive discussion about albinos resulted from the initial exchange. One of the most intriguing things he contended was that there are degrees of albinism. Unfortunately the server carrying the archives for that list went down and has not been restored. I may have copies on an old Superdrive disk, but I haven't installed a recently purchased Superdrive player on a backup computer to check them. That is unfortunately way down the list of projects which must be done first.
If you consider how much it would cost to secure a great strain of fancy guppies, linebreed, and raise 1,000-40,000 of them in an effort to get an albino strain, it might be easier (and a lot cheaper in terms of time, effort, money and space) to purchase a very high priced pair or two trios from one of the breeders which comes up after a www.google.com albino guppy image search or throught the IFGA store. :)
About the 10th of this month I also spun the yarn about how a weak strain of Fundulopanchax garderi (probably the guppy of the killies) was strenthened by backcrossing to a "wild" or gray bodies strain. I wouldn't be surprised that the fixing of several of the other albino fishes in the aquarium hobby have gone through similar care.
I have a strain of Endler's livebearer which began throwing xanthic (golden fry) not long after I brought them home. If you can't be good, be lucky. ;)
If you don't mind, I'm going to spin this Endler experience off as a Log entry. I too need some help, encouragement and advice as to what to do.
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