Banner: Depicts Xiphophorus maculatus "Rio Grijalva" Japan strain. Photo by Momo Tsugunaga. Used with permission.
This article was originally written for “Livebearers”, the journal of the American Livebearers Association, issue #229, Winter 2015-2016.
It’s not everyday an auction for wild platys (specifically, Xiphophorus maculatus) appears on Aquabid. All aquarium strains of platys are hybrids with other Xiphophorus species, and I was looking to keep a wild strain. Sure enough, a series of auctions appeared in late summer 2014 for “Xiph maculatus Rio Grijalva” [sic] from several different sellers. I hadn’t heard of this population before, but I had to have them regardless. A bid or two later I had 8 inch-long juvies on my doorstep. And boy was I unprepared!
Initially, I put them in a 5 gallon tank for a few days just to observe their exotic pattern and behavior. I made sure to take note of whatever coloration was observable at that size. Each fish seemed to blend into the next, as they all expressed the Shoulder Spot and Moon patterns. I later learned this particular collection also expresses Yellow Caudal Peduncle and One Spot. Unfortunately, that would be the last I saw of these fish. I moved them into a 20 gallon bucket (Texas version of a pond), and all were lost to a north Texas freeze-over I was unprepared for. But that’s not where my story ends!
I will add a couple notes from what I learned keeping these fish. First of all, wild fish are excellent jumpers from my experience. While fancy livebearers have literally evolved to the home aquarium, wild strains are better adapted to conditions found in the wild. This results in fish that are good jumpers, skittish, and reluctant to eat dry food.
The seller did include a little note with the first auction. “These fish are descendants of those collected by Rusty Wessel.” For those of you unfamiliar with Rusty, imagine the Indiana Jones of the fishkeeping world: an adventurer who journeys to the places others will not to retrieve aquatic treasurers, be that cichlids, rare livebearers or anything else he can find. Personal correspondence with Mr. Wessel revealed that “they have been brought in many many times over the years. It would be difficult to say what year. I generally donate a few fry out of my colony to clubs all across the US when I give lectures on that area. The fry could be F2’s to F 10’s.”
On other trips he collected many other livebearer populations such as X. eiseni “Tamazula”, X. kalmanni “Catemaco” and the popular X. helleri “Rio Otapa”.
This particular strain hails from the “Villahermosa area via drainage of the Rio Grijalva. I and Juan Miguel Artigas and Horacio Dominguez have collected them many times. Some are quite variable… They generally are easily found in lowland swamps where the Grijalva floods each year.”
While the Wessel strain of the Grijalva platy may be considered bland by some, the foreign strains will blow any livebearer enthusiast’s socks off! This strain is not the only collection of platys from the Rio Grijalva, as there are beautiful (but unrelated) strains in Europe and Japan. From Sweden, there is a strain collected in 2009 where males also have a Red Dorsal fin. But the king of the X. maculatus “Rio Grijalva” is found on the other side of the planet, where Japanese breeders keep a striking strain. Along with Moon, Shoulder Spot, and Yellow Caudal Peduncle found on Wessel strain fish, and Red Dorsal found in European stock, the Japanese strain expresses Spot-Sided Version 3 (“Salt-and-Pepper”) body coloration, and males sport a Spotted Dorsal and the most remarkable feature, Mouth Red which has earned the nickname “Akaho” (Aka = Red, Hoho = Cheeks). If only we could get these here in the US!
The Japanese strain. Bred and photographed by Momoko Tsugunaga (Japan).
A male from the Japanese strain “Akaho”. Bred and photographed by Momoko Tsugunaga (Japan).
Xiphophorus maculatus is, as Rosen once put it, “one of the most variable of all wild vertebrates”, and this population is no exception. There are dozens of different color patterns found across the species’ range, and tremendous variability even within a population! This explains why strains collected from the same location can look very different from one another. For example, fish from this river are occasionally found to show Nigra, which is expressed as a single, black band across the body, known in domestic fish as “tuxedo”.
I recently re-obtained these fish, and I intend on both maintaining a large population of these fish, and cross offspring with domestic strains to improve body confirmation and study the effects of wild modifiers on traits such as plumetail.
It really is no surprise there is so much variation in this population. The Grijalva river is huge, and there are many opportunities for various populations to mix. The river even flows into a lake, which sounds to me like a perfect melting pot. But whatever the reason is, the Rio Grijalva hasn’t ceased to impress me since I began this journey. And, who knows? I may even visit it one day!
It’s not everyday an auction for wild platys (specifically, Xiphophorus maculatus) appears on Aquabid. All aquarium strains of platys are hybrids with other Xiphophorus species, and I was looking to keep a wild strain. Sure enough, a series of auctions appeared in late summer 2014 for “Xiph maculatus Rio Grijalva” [sic] from several different sellers. I hadn’t heard of this population before, but I had to have them regardless. A bid or two later I had 8 inch-long juvies on my doorstep. And boy was I unprepared!
Initially, I put them in a 5 gallon tank for a few days just to observe their exotic pattern and behavior. I made sure to take note of whatever coloration was observable at that size. Each fish seemed to blend into the next, as they all expressed the Shoulder Spot and Moon patterns. I later learned this particular collection also expresses Yellow Caudal Peduncle and One Spot. Unfortunately, that would be the last I saw of these fish. I moved them into a 20 gallon bucket (Texas version of a pond), and all were lost to a north Texas freeze-over I was unprepared for. But that’s not where my story ends!
I will add a couple notes from what I learned keeping these fish. First of all, wild fish are excellent jumpers from my experience. While fancy livebearers have literally evolved to the home aquarium, wild strains are better adapted to conditions found in the wild. This results in fish that are good jumpers, skittish, and reluctant to eat dry food.
The seller did include a little note with the first auction. “These fish are descendants of those collected by Rusty Wessel.” For those of you unfamiliar with Rusty, imagine the Indiana Jones of the fishkeeping world: an adventurer who journeys to the places others will not to retrieve aquatic treasurers, be that cichlids, rare livebearers or anything else he can find. Personal correspondence with Mr. Wessel revealed that “they have been brought in many many times over the years. It would be difficult to say what year. I generally donate a few fry out of my colony to clubs all across the US when I give lectures on that area. The fry could be F2’s to F 10’s.”
On other trips he collected many other livebearer populations such as X. eiseni “Tamazula”, X. kalmanni “Catemaco” and the popular X. helleri “Rio Otapa”.
This particular strain hails from the “Villahermosa area via drainage of the Rio Grijalva. I and Juan Miguel Artigas and Horacio Dominguez have collected them many times. Some are quite variable… They generally are easily found in lowland swamps where the Grijalva floods each year.”
While the Wessel strain of the Grijalva platy may be considered bland by some, the foreign strains will blow any livebearer enthusiast’s socks off! This strain is not the only collection of platys from the Rio Grijalva, as there are beautiful (but unrelated) strains in Europe and Japan. From Sweden, there is a strain collected in 2009 where males also have a Red Dorsal fin. But the king of the X. maculatus “Rio Grijalva” is found on the other side of the planet, where Japanese breeders keep a striking strain. Along with Moon, Shoulder Spot, and Yellow Caudal Peduncle found on Wessel strain fish, and Red Dorsal found in European stock, the Japanese strain expresses Spot-Sided Version 3 (“Salt-and-Pepper”) body coloration, and males sport a Spotted Dorsal and the most remarkable feature, Mouth Red which has earned the nickname “Akaho” (Aka = Red, Hoho = Cheeks). If only we could get these here in the US!
The Japanese strain. Bred and photographed by Momoko Tsugunaga (Japan).
A male from the Japanese strain “Akaho”. Bred and photographed by Momoko Tsugunaga (Japan).
Xiphophorus maculatus is, as Rosen once put it, “one of the most variable of all wild vertebrates”, and this population is no exception. There are dozens of different color patterns found across the species’ range, and tremendous variability even within a population! This explains why strains collected from the same location can look very different from one another. For example, fish from this river are occasionally found to show Nigra, which is expressed as a single, black band across the body, known in domestic fish as “tuxedo”.
I recently re-obtained these fish, and I intend on both maintaining a large population of these fish, and cross offspring with domestic strains to improve body confirmation and study the effects of wild modifiers on traits such as plumetail.
It really is no surprise there is so much variation in this population. The Grijalva river is huge, and there are many opportunities for various populations to mix. The river even flows into a lake, which sounds to me like a perfect melting pot. But whatever the reason is, the Rio Grijalva hasn’t ceased to impress me since I began this journey. And, who knows? I may even visit it one day!