Endler's Livebearers and File Gumbo
Ricardo came by for dinner tonight. Its nice having company, easier to cook for several rather than one, and it is good to give something back to someone who has been so generous to me over the years. File gumbo was the experiment of the day, and it came out well. I'd never made a Cajun gumbo before, only okra and roux based Creole recipes. It was dark and smoky, though it would have benefited from a bit more chicken stock. Making new things is always exciting, and it was made even more so by the fact that I had a captive audience to mock me if all went wrong. I had thought it would be done by about seven or so, but was a bit off on my estimate. Only by two hours though.
Yesterday night Jeremy came over with a fistful of fish. It was rather a surprise for both of us. He had gone to pick up a few cuttings from a club member only to find he had an overabundance of Endler's livebearers. These little fishes have the most remarkable coloration and a nice background story. I happen to like stories. Come on over sometime and I will tell it to you. I like small fish, and I have a lot of open space in my new 55 gallon tank with way too few fishes to fill it. Endler's breed extraordinarily fast, so before long the twenty or so juveniles and the few adults ought to fill that tank nicely. I am rather looking forward to seeing the blinding colors flashing through that tank. After a bit of research I found that my little friends are a pure strain (which I desired) rather than a hybridized strain which is much more common in the fish stores. The colors look (so far) as though they breed a little too true. Dr. Endler reported that in the wild the colors of these fish seemed to have a huge variation, though after some few generations and the possible hybridization with guppies, the colors have started to breed true from parent to fry. It might be an interesting study to find another pure strain and try crossing them with mine in order to broaden the gene pool enough so that the random colors start popping again.
Yesterday night Jeremy came over with a fistful of fish. It was rather a surprise for both of us. He had gone to pick up a few cuttings from a club member only to find he had an overabundance of Endler's livebearers. These little fishes have the most remarkable coloration and a nice background story. I happen to like stories. Come on over sometime and I will tell it to you. I like small fish, and I have a lot of open space in my new 55 gallon tank with way too few fishes to fill it. Endler's breed extraordinarily fast, so before long the twenty or so juveniles and the few adults ought to fill that tank nicely. I am rather looking forward to seeing the blinding colors flashing through that tank. After a bit of research I found that my little friends are a pure strain (which I desired) rather than a hybridized strain which is much more common in the fish stores. The colors look (so far) as though they breed a little too true. Dr. Endler reported that in the wild the colors of these fish seemed to have a huge variation, though after some few generations and the possible hybridization with guppies, the colors have started to breed true from parent to fry. It might be an interesting study to find another pure strain and try crossing them with mine in order to broaden the gene pool enough so that the random colors start popping again.
posted by zLog at 10:30 PM
1 Comments:
I also recently got some Endler's and my thoughts are exactly like yours. I want to get other pure trains to mix so that I can get the random colors and patterns. The fish I have are beautiful, but the males (only 3 so far) look so much the same I don't even try to tell them apart... But I might be surprised when the females drop their fry!
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