Would Guppies keep their colors throughout generations?

so if i got say 4 orange male guppies and 10 female guppies, and they reproduced for say 5 generations, would the offspring from the 5th generation look like the original parents (as in, would they still be orange)? or would they develop new colors/lose their colors/not look anything like their parents? just wondering as I'm planning to maybe set up a large fish tank with only guppies in it but only really wanted orange guppies and was wondering if the fish would still be orange after a while. thanks!

 

Depends what the females look like. If they're also orange then in all likelihood yes. If they're a different colour/breed then the offspring would likely come out with a blend of colours and revert to the cobra and snakeskin basal domestic guppy types. After 5 generations no one can really predict how they'd look although they would likely resemble very drab versions of the snakeskin and feeder guppies sold in stores. Very often when crossbreeding the large, fancy tails are not preserved and are absent even from the first generation, the male offspring instead having either the very basal extended tail or the wild-type tail indistinguishable in size and shape to the female tail. The offspring of both a delta-tail half-black and a blue moscow of mine have either the basal extended tail or no fancy tail at all. The males also tend to be quite small. After 5 generations they will likely be the same size as male endlers which have largely not been bred in the same way as guppies and are still wild-type except for selectively bred hybrids. If it's of any interest, the male part-blue moscow offspring are bigger and have a higher incidence of the basal extended tail. The male red HB offspring have almost no incidence of domestic tails at all and aren't much bigger than my endlers. The mothers of both were yellow HBs. The HBs are quite a basal breed while the blue moscows are more derived, which may have something to do with it. More of the derived traits may have been preserved from the blue moscow.

 

Depends what the females look like. If they're also orange then in all likelihood yes. If they're a different colour/breed then the offspring would likely come out with a blend of colours and revert to the cobra and snakeskin basal domestic guppy types. After 5 generations no one can really predict how they'd look although they would likely resemble very drab versions of the snakeskin and feeder guppies sold in stores. Very often when crossbreeding the large, fancy tails are not preserved and are absent even from the first generation, the male offspring instead having either the very basal extended tail or the wild-type tail indistinguishable in size and shape to the female tail. The offspring of both a delta-tail half-black and a blue moscow of mine have either the basal extended tail or no fancy tail at all. The males also tend to be quite small. After 5 generations they will likely be the same size as male endlers which have largely not been bred in the same way as guppies and are still wild-type except for selectively bred hybrids. If it's of any interest, the male part-blue moscow offspring are bigger and have a higher incidence of the basal extended tail. The male red HB offspring have almost no incidence of domestic tails at all and aren't much bigger than my endlers. The mothers of both were yellow HBs. The HBs are quite a basal breed while the blue moscows are more derived, which may have something to do with it. More of the derived traits may have been preserved from the blue moscow.

thank you for such a detailed response!

yea I bred guppies in the past and they eventually all looked like endlers. tbh I don't think ill get a female guppy that'll have the same colors as a male, so the chances that after a while, all the guppies turn a boring gray/brown color is sadly, very high.

do you know if this is the same for platies by any chance?

 

thank you for such a detailed response!

yea I bred guppies in the past and they eventually all looked like endlers. tbh I don't think ill get a female guppy that'll have the same colors as a male, so the chances that after a while, all the guppies turn a boring gray/brown color is sadly, very high.

do you know if this is the same for platies by any chance?

Platies' colours are much less complicated and they don't have anywhere near the amount of domestic traits as fancy i.e. domestic guppies. In most cases you will actually find offspring will inherit a mix of both parents' colours. I believe they only revert to the wild type southern platy or variatus platy rarely after a long period of uncontrolled breeding. The same goes for swordtails and probably mollies. You can't really get a reversion to a wild-type in these fish because simply, it doesn't exist. All three of these domestic fish are actually hybrids of several wild species, the most notable of these being the domestic molly which is made of something like 10 species of wild Poecilia. The domestic swordtail has in the region of 4-5 wild components, the platy about 3 or 4, and both the domestic swordtail and domestic platy varieties have all been hybridised multiple times in the hobby so they're also both a bit of each other. Because of that you can't really get them to revert to a 'wild-type'. The best you'll get in that regard is some sort of brownish muddle of different wild and domestic traits. Normally if you're just crossing 2 or 3 different breeds of these fish they'll come out as a mix of them all with no reversions to a 'wild-type'. Guppies do revert to a more basal breed and eventually a wild-type because they haven't really been hybridised with anything until very recently (endlers) and those traits are still very strong and concentrated. This lack of hybridisation in the domestication process is probably a factor in why the guppy is so weak in comparison to the other domestic livebearers, because its gene pool has been restricted even more. Had the guppy been hybridised with other guppyids like endlers and micropoecilia during domestication, they may not have ended up as weak and still maintain hardiness comparable to the mollies.

 

If you'd breed a certain trait in a guppy line, and that specific trait (can be colors, pattern body shape and the shape of the finnage) has been settled well, this trait will still be shown after many generations. But even a true breeding guppy line can have a certain percentage of offspring that will show the specific trait less. That's quite normal. To ensure the quality of this specific trait, we need to cull. So we select only the specimens that show the desired trait the best. All specimens that don't meet up the specific trait(s) sufficiently, will be eliminated from the good ones. We call it culling. This doesn't mean that they should be killed. But you just separate them from the desired specimens.

If you keep only mass reproduction and won't do any selecting, the quality of he desired trait will weaken.

When will guppies revert to wild type?
1.) If you put all kinds of guppies (so, different genetic background), at some point you'll notice that male will develop as being wild type.
2.) If you'll put them outdoors at some point, in further offspring more and more wild type guppies will develop.
3.) Even with a true breeding fancy line, if we won't cull in each generation and we let them just breed in mass reproduction, more and more specimens will develop that won't show the traits of that guppy line too well. The more you leave such specimens in the colony, the more the deviant traits in the bloodline will show up and becomes dominant. More and more abnormal traits will become visible and at some point they'll revert to wild type. For even in a crowd, those large fins will only be a burden to move properly. Mother Nature will be in play and will take care of it, that those fins will be shortened.