I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to any of you but I’ve been playing an aquarium sim game called Aquazone for about a year now. Don’t click away just yet! It isn’t that kind of aquarium sim!
This one has genetics!
While I have the option of creating pretty tanks that don’t involve breeding, I also have the option to create new strains of guppies, angelfish and discus! I’ll be focusing strictly on guppies for now and I’ll be taking full advantage of “Time Warping”. I don’t have the patience to sit and wait for weeks at a time for guppies to be born, you know!
Anyway, the manual actually comes with instructions if you’d like to start working with guppies. The first example it gives you is to try to stabilize a population of Red Tail guppies. The guppy packs don’t come ‘pre-settled’ so it’s important to have homozygous populations to work with before you start breeding.
I started by choosing a male closest to the color that I wanted. I bred him with F25, one of my females, and found that together they only produced one male that looked like this guppy.
As promising as 1 ideal male is, it still isn’t that good. Since I had so many other females to breed him with anyway, I decided to move on.
Attempt two, with F16 was much better. She produced lots of males (10 to be exact) and 4 were ideal. Since she only had 4 females, I have a much smaller testing population, but that makes it much easier to get what I want.
The male from this population that I chose is brighter than the original male but I think I prefer this more vibrant red anyway. Otherwise I wouldn’t have picked him. ;D
It was difficult to try to get him to breed with the available ladies but when it was finally said and done, I got this group of fry.
We still have some dark red guppies in the group but the numbers are still pretty good. This time, 4 out of 6 males came in the color we want.
This time, I’m going to see which female of the 8 I have available this time produces the most ideal males.
This is our new male. He’s much closer to the original male and all of the other ‘ideal males’ that I’ve chosen from this generation look just like him. The population is starting to stabilize.
This is the group born from our selected male and F1. I don’t think she’s the best choice.
The pairing with F2 was much more ideal but I’d love to see if any of the other 6 females yields a better result.
F3, unfortunately, doesn’t have a result. After an hour of trying, I couldn’t get my guppies to breed.
F4 produced these pink tailed guppies! As pretty as they are, I’d rather not deviate from what I started.
F5 yielded only 3 males and of the three, just 1 looks the way we want him to.
So. F6 yielded 0 ideal males. I think we can move on.
Now this is what I like to see. F7 produced 5 ideal males out of the 6 males that she gave birth to. Perfect! So far, she’s got a better ratio than any of the other females and I think this is about as good as it’s going to get.
At this point, I’ve been at it for about 5 hours and need to call it a break. Wish me luck!
