What's Happening at Guppy Designer
Schimmelpfennig Platinum Sword
The front page of the main guppy designer site (the one you are on now) has become a blog. I will be updating it on a fairly regular basis.
Things have slowed down in my real job (building websites and ecommerce platforms) so I have more time to devote to the hobby of guppy genetics. Besides giving this site a new skin to reflect its direction as a learning site for people who share my interest in guppy genetics, I have started to write a new electronic book on guppy care, which really is the first order of business of any site that claims to support the guppy habit.
New Guppy Care E-Book
I have a lot of material I took down from the old Guppy Designer that really got down deep into the science of guppy care. But I guess people are not really that interested in it, or at least nobody wrote to me to tell me the information was useful. So my new electronic pdf will be detailed but it won't get that far into water chemistry or amino acids. As it turns out, after keeping most of my guppies healthy at any given time in the last ten years, it is only recently that I have got them back to the point where I find very few dead or sick guppies in my tanks. This is despite constantly and relentlessly reducing the time spent maintaining them.
I put that down to three things I implemented in the last year.
- I keep coral and coral substitutes in my tanks to compensate for the soft water conditions locally.
- I feed the best quality food I can buy (New Life Spectrum) more sparingly.
- I have converted entirely to sponge filters, with two in every tank. Every month I change out one of the sponges and put the dirty one through the wash, disinfecting them with bleach.
Since doing that one of the problems in my tanks, a percentage of emaciated females, has virtually disappeared. I heavily feed my fish with brine shrimp, so I am guessing that the brine shrimp was fouling my sponge filters. In any event my new "Guppy Care for the Guppy Breeder" book will survey the state of knowledge about guppy care and recommend methods I have found successful. The trouble is getting to the book in the midst of everything else I am doing.
Microscope Studies
It is hard to tear myself away from the new microscope. Last week I upgraded my scope to a 3.2 megapixel camera which increased the resolution of my images by four times. What a huge difference that has made. And what a far cry from the 320x240 images that my Intel "toy" camera took some eight years ago. That is 41 times more pixels.
But that is not the whole story. I upgraded the 40X objective (lens) of the microscope to a plan objective, which produces a much sharper image throughout the entire image. Take a look at this:
X400 Lower Sword of Schimmelfennig Platinum Sword.
This is a study of the yellow area on the lower sword of the guppy you see at the top of this blog. It uses my new plan objective.
I actually had a lot of trouble (and continue to have trouble) with shooting platinum color, both with my digital SLR and my Accu-Scope camera. Platinum color is produced by the light reflecting color cells called iridophores, and they tend to flare in strong light. I decided it made sense to shoot the guppy whose cells I was going to study on the digital SLR. But it is winter here so I could not take the photo tank outside for shooting in the sunlight.
As it turns out that was a lucky break. A couple of years ago I went to a hardware store and bought a couple of halogen work lights to act as photography lights. But I was not able to get good results. This time I set them up and supplemented them with the on-camera flash of my digital SLR. I turned down the camera flash to 1/64 power. The image you see at the top of this article is the result.
I have lost a bit of vibrancy I got in full sunlight. But the image is much, much sharper than what I have got before. And the big surprise is that the color is really faithful to the guppy seen with the naked eye. I did no special color correction in-camera.
In the article I wrote about the Schimmelpfennig Platinum sword I was able to use cropped areas from the original full resolution camera image (3648 X 2736 or 10 megapixels) to supplment the images from the microscope (which begin at 40X size). Very useful for studying areas of color on the guppy. In essence I get a sharper close-up image.
Cropped area from the original full resolution image
You can see the problem of shooting reflecting color cells. They flare. But look how much detail you can see. Notice how the yellow platinum is ringed by green platinum. This extreme close-up with a very high quality macro lens was worth all the effort and cost I put into the study. It gave me new information about the color cells of the Schimmelpfennig Platinum Sword.
I was also able to do a comparison between a microscope image at 400X of a Schimmelpfennig yellow platinum area and the yellow platinum from an albino Full Gold Leucophore (called Full Platinum in Asia). They look almost identical.
See the wealth of information my new microscope studies is providing me? I am doing this work for the new book that will complete the trilogy of books I am writing about guppy genetics and color biology. I have another amazing photo of a yellow color cell spreading its extensions over an entire area.
There is a whole new beautiful and detailed world beneath the scope. If somebody wants to produce a calendar from my high resolution images of guppy color cells, I would gladly cooperate by providing the images. It would make a great calendar as some of the images are spectacularly beautiful. A whole new dimension to the hobby.
If you would like to comment on this blog, I would love to hear from you. Just post it on the new Guppy Designer Facebook discussion page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Westminster-BC/Guppy-Designer/176952392916?v=app_2373072738&ref=ts
Philip