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Re: Heterandria formosa/ color changes
Chris,
I think you may be right. I have notices local strains that have a lot of
variety. I'd be interested to see the types of strains out there . Very
interesting stuff....BTW I Should be shipping fish on Saturday if the
come out of quarintine OK. Your next on my list. BTW I once collected
melanistic H. Formosa from a ditch near Tallahasse. Unfourtunaltly the
entire bucket tipped over and the top popped off so they never made it
home..........:)
On Tue, 26 May 1998 09:28:20 -0400 Chris Darrow <darrowcs at sover_net>
writes:
>I have a tank of Heterandria formosa (Least Mosquito Fish) and I've
>made
>some interesting observations (I think ;-) ).
>My fish were all caught wild, some from So Florida (on Rt 75 between
>Ft
>Lauderdale and the Gulf Coast) and some from the panhandle , but
>certainly much farther north than the Rt 75 group.
> I've noticed some differences in the two groups. The northern
>group
>has the ability to lose all of its coloration. I've seen the females
>turn virtually completely gold.
>
>The males do something similar in that they lose their stripe but
>become
>a solid grey coloration. The males will do this when challenging one
>another for dominance. They lose all of their stripe and accentuate a
>spot on their dorsal fin and display the spot to each other, spreading
>their dorsal fin and swimming sideways at each other, this finally
>ends
>when one male attacks and chases the other. The strange thing is I
>swear
>that only the two males (which came from the north ) do this and/or
>have
>the ability to do this . Some of the other males do not seem to be
>able
>to lose their coloration, nor do they seem as aggressive. The color
>changing males even attack females if in an aggressive "mood".
>
> Has anyone observed the above mentioned behavior. It occurred
>to me
>that maybe only the dominant males will change color, but there is one
>female that doesn't change color and it came from the south. Somewhere
>I
>remember reading about a gold variant of H formosa. Is it possible
>that
>there is several color morphs of H formosa? This would include a non
>fading morph, a morph that has the ability to lose its coloration and
>a
>morph with no pigmentation? I'd almost go as far as to say that the
>morph with the ability to lose its coloration, exhibits a differant
>behavioral pattern (more aggressive, more territorial) than the other.
>Could this represent two races?
>
> Chris
>Darrow
>
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