Several years ago we brought a strain of the old hobby strain of Endler's livebearers home from a club function. The males, which Scott Lockwood suggests are of the peacock strain, are probably descended from the original fish which were collected by Dr Endler in 1975.

Endler gave some of those fish to Poeciliid authority Dr. Donn Eric Rosen for description. Rosen, who passed away before he could describe them scientifically, happened to have given some to Klaus Kallman of the New York Aquarium. Kallman (bless his heart) gave some to aquarists who bred them and passed them around the hobby. (Imagine Dr. Endler's surprise upon visiting an event in England in the middle '80s and hearing about an "Endler's livebearer"!)

The males in that strain look like (very colorful) peas from the same pod. What is called "founder's effect" seems to have taken place, where the number of males became so few, that only one male color pattern was preserved and passed down to future generations. This is quite different from the diversity exhibited by the Endler's livebearers introduced into the hobby by Armando Poul. It is also different from what Dr. Endler witnessed with the original wild fish he collected. (Noticed that Armando's strain sold for a lot more at ALA auctions a couple of weeks ago.)

See
 http://members.cox.net/newcomb1/armando.html

"Our" strain of Endler's livebearer began throwing xanthic (golden fry) not long after I brought them home. If you can't be good, be lucky. ;)

Xanthic has been described to me as lacking in melanophores or black pigment. However one of the guppy books described a golden guppy as having very small melanophores which are unable to expand and so not perceived.

Some of our xanthic Endler's have then thrown what seem to be a few pure albino offspring. They show males with the typical Endler's coloration. Notice there are a couple of stages of color morphing here. That worries me in that it sounds like there is more than a basic two-gene combination at work.

To complicate things even more, last summer I brought in a disappointing number of the golds (two females and a little squirt) from a barrel in the back yard. In a GL diary entry I mentioned a lone youngster accompanied the two females. What I thought was a young female turned out to be a male albino without the color markings of the other albino males on his sides! (This sounds so like the sneaky colorless guppies in a batch.)

He has bred with the two females who have produced a bunch of mostly gold fry. They too deserve a closer look and larger quarters. A couple lighter fry are also in there with them.

I'm reluctantly pondering the set-up of a rack or table of 10 small tanks (as a starter) to more carefully investigate this phenomenon. A stud book and maybe a database will be set up. That involves quite a disruption in a bedraggled fishroom, which is still in the midst of a long overdue, perpetual, glacial reorganization.

Any advice and suggestions would be appreciated. Visiting geneticists could be put up in my son's humble, cluttered room while he is away at grad school. ;)

Those www.guppylog.com diary entries were:

A Long Time Before an Endler's Birthing
By unclescott Section Diaries
Posted on Thu Jan 22nd, 2004 at 14:54:55 PST