Tag Archives: Guppy

Guppy Endler “Smoky Mary“

17. August 2022

Breeders can’t get enough of creating new color combinations in Endler guppies. The latest thing is the “Smoky Mary”, an Endler in which the entire back appears covered in smoke, which intesivates to a deep black during courtship.

Even though we don’t know the breeding way: the females of Smoky Mary are normally light colored, so they are not melanistic animals, like Black Guppies.

For our customers: The Endler Guppy Smoky Mary has code 419025 on our stock list. Please note that we only supply wholesale.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Endler “Bengal Tiger”

7. March 2022

The tiger breeding forms of the Endler guppy enjoy special popularity. There are multicolour, blue and also selected for yellow body color strains. The latter is called “Bengal Tiger”. The manifestation of pure yellow animals is not easy, there is a tendency to revert to a gray-blue base coloration. But these are also very pretty fish. The caudal fin shape varies between round tail, spear tail and upper sword tail. We supply this breeding form in pairs, so that every keeper can work on his dream guppy by further breeding and further selection. 

For our customers: the animals have code 419129 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesale.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Filigran Guppys – King Cobra Guppys

3. December 2021

The Filigran Guppys belong to the most popular Guppy forms. They have a body pattern of squiggles and dots, which is also called “Snakeskin” or King Cobra. This body pattern sometimes appears in wild Guppys, but it was not until the 1950s that it received more attention and was genetically characterized by M. Dzwillo in 1959. It is a gene localized on the Y chromosome, which only the male possesses. This makes breeding with filigree pattern relatively easy, since each son inherits this gene from the father. The real breeding art is to get this pattern in beautiful expression on the fish and this is now again anything but easy.

We always have different filigran guppys in the stock, very recently especially beautiful “King Cobra Red”, a blond fish with a rust red dorsal stripe starting behind the eye, a rust red caudal peduncle and orange red caudal fins decorated with thin black stripes and “Leopard”, which are filigran guppies with carpet pattern in the caudal fin. 

For our customers: Leopard has 418493, King Cobra Red 418473 on our stock list. Please note that we only supply wholesale.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Japan Blue and Japan Red

24. September 2021

There is a number of tail fin shapes of the guppy, which have been standardized by the guppy breeders. As a rule, however, these breeds are only found at private breeders. In the pet trade the triangle guppies dominate in such a way that aquarists, who do not inform themselves specifically about guppies, could get the impression that these are the “normal guppies”. Recently, however, there has been a move away from this trend.

Double sword guppies are an old breeding form. Already in many wild guppies you can see hints of lower or upper swords – that is a pointed extension of either the upper or the lower tail fin edge. By appropriate breeding selection the double sword can be developed. First reports of double swords date back to 1928, already some years earlier animals with clear predispositions to the double sword appear in illustrations. In contrast, the triangle guppies, which are so dominant today, did not appear until the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Interestingly, however, the double sword was a direct predecessor of the fan tails, from which in turn the modern triangle guppies were bred. The fantail – as can be shown by crossbreeding experiments – is a double sword, so to speak, in which the space between the swords is filled with fin material. The tail fin shape “fan tail” comes from the combination of a certain color gene with the gene for double swords.

One of the most popular double sword guppies in the trade is the beautiful “Japan Blue”. While the name actually refers to the coloration and could be bred on other fin shapes, only specialized guppy breeders usually do. Supposedly, the Japan Blue is called this way because the color is said to have first appeared in feral free-living guppies in Japan. The color is inherited from the male (it is linked to the Y chromosome).

Quite new is the Japan Red, which should actually be correctly named Japan Blue Red, as it exhibits the typical Japan Blue cover sheen, but on a red and gold base coloration. The Japan Red is also bred as a double sword.

For our customers: Japan Blue has code 419043, Japan Red code 419047 on our stock list. Please note that we only supply wholesale.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Kohaku Koi Tuxedo

6. August 2021

Guppy breeders are currently very active again and bring new, attractive strains on the market. The Guppy Kohaku Koi Tuxedo combines two special characteristics: The Kohaku factor, which causes males and females to have a red head combined with a red caudal fin and red dorsum; and the Elephant Ear factor, which causes the greatly enlarged pectoral fins of males to be colored (usually black, but white ones exist) instead of transparent; coupled with the Elephant Ear is often the Tuxedo factor, which causes a black body color with a blue anterior dorsum, but without spilling over to the fins. 

They are very lively, beautiful fishes that will definitely gain a permanent place in the assortment.

For our customers: the animals have code 419205 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesale.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Neon Green Lyretail

9. July 2021

Aquaristics is unimaginable without the multitude of colorful livebearer breeding forms. However, this also means that there is competition between the different breeding lines for the buyers’ favor. A good name clearly sells. And even if, strictly speaking, the Neon Green Lyretail is neither neon green in color nor has a lyre tail – who cares? The little beauty has been sold under this name for a good 20 years and enjoys great popularity.

For our customers: the animals have code 418883 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesale.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Endler Guppy “Blue Tiger”

17. May 2019

There are two different ways of breeding new Endler or Dwarf Guppies. One is to cross different color varieties of the pure species Poecilia wingei (Endlerguppy) with each other or to select and intensify certain color characteristics, which occur within a population, by selective breeding. The other way is to cross Endlerguppy and “normal” Guppy (Poecilia reticulata) to transfer certain color characteristics of the “normal” Guppy to the Endler without losing the dwarf character of the Endlerguppy. This is achieved by backcrossing the hybrids to the parent species Endlerguppy until the desired phenotype (i.e. the outer appearance) has developed.

The “Tiger”-Endler has been bred in this second way and it exists already some years; however, the blue color of the “Blue Tiger” is new. We have received such animals from an Endler breeder now for the first time; they are still quite uneven in their characteristic, but very, very promising!

For our customers: the animals have code 419128 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesalers.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Endler Cross “Santa Maria Bleeding Heart”

8. March 2019

Since 2015 we know this very attractive Guppy, which is a cross of the species Poecilia reticulata and P. wingei and which is attributed to the Japanese breeder Kenichiro Tamura. From the common Guppy, this fish has inherited the more robust shape, especially of the females, and the less intense courtship behaviour, while the petiteness of the males and the caudal fin pattern comes from the Endler heritage. 

What exactly was crossed with whom here is not known to us; there have been Endler-Guppys with black saddle spots for quite some time, e.g. the “Yellow Half Tuxedo” (https://www.aquariumglaser.de/en/fish-archives/brandnew_guppy_endler_yellow_half_tuxedo_en/), the very clear division of the body in respect of coloration shows only the “Rio Morichal” (https://www.aquariumglaser.de/en/fish-archives/wild_guppy_rio_morichal_en/) among the common guppys.

Anyway: Santa Maria Bleeding Heart is a beautiful, lively and cute fish and according to our breeders it is even purebred. We offer the animals with suitable females.

For our customers: the fish have code 419109 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesalers.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

New highly selected guppys: Koi Red Tuxedo Red Nose and Full Black

21. November 2018

In this case “new” does not mean that there were no colour varieties like this before, but that we have a new breeder, who gives us these and other high end breeding guppies in pairs and colour hits, so that we can pass on really fantastic animals. Of course there is also a certain variance within the high end breeding guppies.

For our customers: Koi Red Tuxedo Red Nose has code 419088, Full Black 419089 on our stocklist. Please note that we only supply wholesalers.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy “Red Smoke”

12. September 2018

Glasbelly guppies do not produce guanine due to a genetic peculiarity – this is the silver dye that makes fish glisten. This makes them more or less transparent, as the guanine normally reflects the light and prevents transparency like a mirror. Mostly Glasbelly guppies are bred as albinos. If the black melanin also falls away, the view becomes perfect.

Not everyone likes albinos and therefore there are other established Glassbelly strains, but almost all are blonde, yellow-red in colour. We have now received a number of Glasbelly smoke guppies from a German breeder for the first time. They lack guanine, but not melanin. We think they are distinctive animals and also very vital.

The line was created by mating a normal coloured male with an albino glassbelly female. The young were all wild-coloured, i.e. with normal guanine expression, so the genes of the father were dominant as expected. However, according to Mendel’s rules, the second generation produced a proportion of glass belly with black eyes from which the „Red Smoke“ was bred. The strain isn’t fully bred yet, but that doesn’t matter. For ornamental fish breeding, it is a well-known fact that the path is the goal!

For our customers: the animals have code 419091 on our stock list. Please note that we only supply wholesale. Only available in limited quantities!

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Endler Red Chest Saddleback

28. May 2018

A few years ago we were able to import for the first time guppys that exhibited a black saddle bar over the back, starting at the base of the dorsal fin. These fish were called Yellow Half Tuxedo (see https://www.aquariumglaser.de/en/fish-archives/brandnew_guppy_endler_yellow_half_tuxedo_en/).

An advancement of these guppys represents the Red Chest Saddleback. The breeder takes care that red pattern appears in the chest region. Moreover, the caudal fin pattern has much developed, compared with the typical Endler caudal fin pattern. We can offer the variety Red Chest Saddleback now as German bred ones. The strain itself has been developed by the Japanese breeder Hiroshi Sugino.

The „true“ females of the saddleback Endler guppys can be recognized by a dark spot at the upper base of the caudal fin.

For our customers: the fish have code 419125 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & Photos: Frank Schäfer

Poecilia reticulata Guppy Kohaku / Koi

18. May 2018

The red-white albino guppy is a very attractive fish. The females are quite uniform in respect of coloration. They all have a red head and a red caudal fin. In males things are different. Initially they are colored like the females, but fully grown males develop an individually different degree of red pattern on the body; so in large males all specimens look different.

For our customers: the fish have code 419203 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

High End Guppys

25. April 2018

Currently we can offer several High Quality German Bred Guppys. This breeder is specialized inbreeding rare varieties that are offered by pair, which means that the genetically correct female is supplied along with the male. The sports illustrated here – „Full Platinum Albino“ and „Yellow Tuxedo“ – are only two of serveral ones we have in stock.

For our customers: the fish have code 419097 (Full Platinum Albino) and 419093 (Yellow Tuxedo) on oir stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Poecilia reticulata Guppy Yellow Taxi Glass Belly

13. April 2018

These Glass Belly Guppys are very special. Their coloration lacks not only all black pigment – they are true albinos – but also the silver pigmentation of the abdomen. So one can study the complete develepment of the eggs and youngsters in the belly of the female fish. This means these fish are a perfect subject for all persons interested in natural history and especially for educational reasons in schools. In respect of demands in the aquarium these guppys are not more difficult to keep than other sports of modern fancy guppy, but one should keep in mind that albinos in general are a bit sensitive against strong light.

For our customers: the fish have code 419099 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Endler Black Bar

2. February 2018

There are so many new sports in Endler guppys (Poecilia wingei); it is really difficult to keep the overview. Sadly some of these new sports loose the charme of the wild type fish which are characterized by the very tiny males (usually they should not grow larger than 1.5 – 2cm) and the overboarding vivacity. This loss of wild-type characters happens by crossing the Endler with common guppys (Poecilia reticulata).

A sport of the Endler which is very close to wild collected fish is „Black Bar“. Ideal representatives of that sport  have a double sword tail fin and an emerald green back part of the body. We supply this sport (and many other sports) of the Endler along with the „correct“ females, so every hobbyist can try from the very start to breed what the hobbyist feels is the ideal specimen.

For our customers: the fish have code 419122 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Platinum Gold

20. December 2017

The latest creation from the jewellery Sri Lanka: Platinum Gold. This fish is a further development of the Guppy Full Platinum, which we obtained in August, also from Sri Lanka. The yellow or golden coloration differs a lot individually in the Platinum Gold. Some specimens look like the Full Platinum, just with a yellowish tinge, others glow in a deep egg yolk yellow – a perfect mix!

For our customers: the fish have code 418232 on our stockliat. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Endler „Ginga Rubra“

20. October 2017

This charming sport of the Guppy is said to have been developed in Japan. The name of the Japanese breeder is cited as Tanaka. The „Ginga Rubra“ is a very lively and robust sport. Our specimens are German bred ones, the basic colour of our fish is blond.

For our customers: the fish have code 419016 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

New Guppy: Elephant Ear

6. September 2017

The pectoral fins in Guppys are usually transparent. But there do exist sports with black pectoral fins, like the so called „nigrocaudatus“-types and the Moskow Guppys. Breeders have made this peculiarity the target of their most recent new sport. Obviously initially only colourful guppys with pitchblack pectorals were planned, but then the breeders discovered that the pectorals can also become larger by selective breeding. So the elephant ears in guppys developed, a really matching common name!

For our customers: the fish have code 418502 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Guppy Full Platinum

30. August 2017

My dear! After 15 years of pleasureful co-operation our flashlight installation of the photo tank crashed. Today the substitute arrived and we tested it with the latest guppy sport from Sri Lanka: Full Platinum. As anybody knows who has ever tried it: totally white and totally black fish are the hardest challenge in respect of flashlight settings. What can we say: it works!

For our customers: the Full Platinum has Code 419097 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

Poecilia wingei, Endler´s Livebearer „White Peacock“

10. April 2017

The breeding of the different sports of Endler´s Livebearer has become a popular branch of the hobby. There are a lot of sports, some artifical – developed by cross-breeding or selective breeding – some are different looking populations that appear in the wild. The White Peacock is such a wild type. The ancestors of the fish in the trade have been collected by Armado Pou in 2004 from the Laguna de los Patos North Lake, according to the informations available from specialized web pages. For sure the fish are now much more uniformly coloured than the animals living in the wild, but they still have their extremely lively habit and they have stayed so wonderful small and dainty. Displaying males become much darker in coloration, compared with the neutral coloration. We obtain our fish from our proofed breeder in Thailand. The matching females are also available.

For our customers: the animals have code 419117 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer

The story of the Cologne wild guppy

15. February 2017

It was back in 1977 when first reports about this „German wild guppy“ appeared in aquarium journals. This was in the „Informationen der Deutschen Guppy-Förderation Nr.3“. Shortly after that Franz-Peter Müllenholz wrote a report for the magazine TI (No 42, June 1978) on that fish that lived in a brook near Cologne. The water was very polluted, there were deformed animals, but most of the fish were very healthy and lively. Müllenholz also pointed out the very selender figure of that fish. Werner Ladiges, editor of the TI, doubted that these guppys really established a constant population. But two editions later, in TI No 44 (December 1978) the theme was continued. In a short note it was made clear that a power plant led the cooling water in that brook, so it became heated. In March, the water temperature was as high as 19°C. This is the salient point, fot the lowest temperature tolerated by guppys over a longer period (some weeks) is about 14-16°C.

In scientific literature the existence of these guppys is even longer documented (Friedrich, 1973). He also named the brook: it is the Gillbach, and the power plant is os the cole plant Niederaußem (the largest power plant of that type in Germany). The guppys were (and still are) also present in the lower Erft, in which the Gillbach flows. The lower Erft is heated by hot water pumped up from up to 400 m depth from cole mines. Here do not exist only guppys, but also many other tropcal organisms: Amatitlania nigrofasciata, Ancistrus, the snails Melanoides tuberculatus and Planorbella duryi, the annelid worm Branchyura sowerbii, the planaria Dugesia tigrina, the shrimps Neocaridina davidi and Macrobacrium dayanum, as well as a nuber of tropical water weeds: Azolla filiculoides, Egeria densa, Lemna aequinoctialis, L. minuta, Myriophyllum aquaticum, Pistia stratiotes, and Shinnersia rivularis (Friedrich, 2005). Most of these organisms are for sure relaesed by aquarists, but in some cases it is not clear were they originate from.

The Cologne wild guppys are interesting animals. And the good news is: one has not to travel to Cologne to get them. Currently we have these „Cologne wild guppys“ in stock, they are aquarium-bred specimens, but the ancestors were collected in the Gillbach. So these fish found back their way in the tanks of the hobbyists – a quite interesting process from a scientific point of view that gives insights in co-evolutionary processes of mankind and their domesticated animals. In the Gillbach and the Erft the guppys will become extinct as soon as the introduction of heate water ends – that´s for sure. But maybe they can survive as a curiosity in the tanks of aquarists? Nobody knows…

For our customers: the fish have code 419028 on our stocklist. Please note that we exclusively supply the wholesale trade.

Literature cited:

Friedrich, G. (1973): Ökologische Untersuchungen an einem thermisch anomalen Fließgewässer (Erft/Niederrhein). – Schriftenreihe Landesanstalt für Gewässerkunde und Gewässerschutz NRW Heft 33, Kempen-Hüls. 

Friedrich, G. (2005): Die untere Erft – Ein subtropischer Fluss. LUA Gewässergütebericht 2005: 101–103 

Ladiges, W. (1978): Betr.: Guppypopulation in der Nähe von Köln. TI Tatsachen und Informationen aus der Aquaristik 12 (44): 42

Müllenholz, F.-P. (1978): Guppypopulation in der Nähe von Köln. TI Tatsachen und Informationen aus der Aquaristik 12 (42): 42-43

Text & photos: Frank Schäfer