Endlers.nl - What is a guppy anyway ?

How the Guppy got its name, and why it is not called a "Gollmer"..

The Guppy takes its name from Robert John Lechmere Guppy ( born 1836 in London; died 1916 in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago).
British-born "Lechmere," as he was called, was raised by his grandparents. In 1858 he went to Trinidad, where his parents were living. He married and became Trinidad's first Chief Inspector of Schools. Although he had no formal training in the sciences, (he was a civil engineer by trade), Lechmere wrote and published numerous articles on the palaeontology of the region. Contrary to popular myth, Lechmere Guppy, as he was known, was NOT a clergyman. He was, in fact, an agnostic.

Regarding the naming of the fish, Lechmere Guppy's daughter Enid Fraser was quoted in The Aquarium, Vol. XIV No. 7, November, 1945, as writing the following:

". . .chief credit for the name should go to my father, the late Dr. Robert John Lechmere Guppy who, although a conchologist and geologist was the first to discover the small livebearer here [Trinidad] and was rather intrigued by its appearance. He sent specimens to London for cataloguing and scientific description by the then Keeper (Curator) of Zoology of the British Museum, the late Dr. Albert Carl Ludwig Gotthilf Guenther. The latter named the fish Girardinus guppii in honor of my father, and this scientific label was employed long enough for its specific designation to be returned, by popular terminology, to its original form: Guppy. Later on, after research by many scientists had been collated, the title Lebistes reticulatus was decide upon as being the best scientific term for the fish, but despite all this technical change Dr. Guenther's original specific designation based upon my father's name, has continued in good standing throughout the world as the common name for the fish."

The genus Girardinus was named after the French biologist Charles Girard.

The reason for the change of scientific name was at least in part that ,Wilhelm Karl Hartwig Peters, head of the Ichthyology department of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, had described the fish in a paper on Venezuelan fishes in the bulletin of the Academy many years before Lechmere Guppy sent his specimens to the British Museum

Julius Gollmer, an amateur German biologist, found "Guppies" in the Rio Guayre near Caracas, Venezuela, in 1857 and 1858. He sent these fish preserved in jars to the Imperial Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin. Gollmer's first shipment to the Museum included 61 colourful fish, caught in the Rio Guayre near his home in Caracas during 1856. The ichthyologists were apparently not impressed with the fish and the Museum gave Julius Gollmer only faint praise, paid him 100 "Reichstaler" and then promptly filed the jars containing the specimens in the archives.. Gollmer was naturally unhappy about this and over the years contact between Gollmer and the Museum faded until Gollmer died in 1861. This were the fishes that Peters described, and and it is only due to a filing error that the Guppy is not known as the "Gollmer".

Some time after 1866, the original males that Julius Gollmer sent to Berlin were found and labelled Girardinus Guppyi. The females that had previously been named Poecilia were forced to take on the name of the male counterpart, as was the practice in those days.

The reason for the delay in describing the males by Peters is not clearly understood. It is known that Gollmer had shipped males and females in the same jars and although he may have been no ichthyologist, when catching the fish he should have noticed the obvious colour differences between the two sexes and put them in separate jars. Despite this, Peters, who was educated in ichthyology, should have certainly known about the sexual dimorphism of Poecilids as Haeckel had described the two sexes of the green swordtail (Xiphophorus helleri) as early as 1848. The labelling of Gollmer's jars and the lack of communication between Berlin and Gollmer may have compounded the confusion.

During Regan's revision of the Genus Poecilidae in 1913 both stocks from the Berlin and London Museums were recognised to be the same species and renamed Lebistes reticulatus (acknowledging Peters description as the first valid one). A further revision by Rosen and Bailey in 1963 changed the species name Poecilia reticulata, making Peters 1859 description valid again.The scientific name of Guppies has undergone quite a number of revisions in the past 100+ years, for now settling on the name of Poecilia reticulata (Rosen and Bailey, 1963) You may still see the Guppy described under the scientific name of Lebistes reticulata or otherwise in scientific publications.( Acanthocephalus guppii, Acanthocephalus reticulatus, Girardinus guppyi, Girardinus Petersi, Girardinus poeciloides, Girardinus reticulatus, Haridichthys reticulatus, Heterandria guppyi, Lebistes reticulatus,Lebistes poecilioides, Poecilia poeciloides, Poecilioides reticulatus, etc.)

The first recorded live Guppies to enter Europe were into Germany in December 1908; Carl Siggelkow imported them in to Hamburg were it was soon nicknamed "Millionenfisch" (million Fish).

Around 1920 a Leipzig fish club in Germany developed the first points system for judging Guppies, the maximum points available was 50, the club held the first recorded Guppy show in November 1922.

Guppy preparations Berlin 1866

Poecilia reticulata from Julius Gollmer

The first fancy Guppy in today's terms that became widely available was the swordtail and although swordtail guppies do occur in the wild, the double swordtail does not and was first isolated and developed around 1928.

The Micro Look-a-Like, Native: Poecilia reticulata var. Morichal Orange Line

The Micro Look-a-Like Wildtype, Poecilia reticulata var. Orange Line, origin: "Rio / River Morichal Largo", is a tributary of the Orinoco River (A location of P. reticulata)

The Micro Look-a-Like, Native: Poecilia reticulata var. Morichal Orange Line

Locus Typicus, Poecilia reticulata var. Orangeline

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Location of Wild Guppy outside South-Amerika

Philippines (wild guppy) Biotope Georgetown Heights Molino IV, Bacoor, Cavite, Philippines

What is a species; remarks on the renaming of ELB to Poecilia wingei

Species mean more to humans than they do to Nature. Species boundaries are artifical constructs that exist to make life quantifiable and classifiable. The very fact that Endlers and "regular" guppies interbreed so easily reinforces this point, and whatever we call an ELB, from the point of view of a guppy, it's close enough to be seen as a potential mate.

When animals like fish receive a name in a scientific paper, this is merely an opinion. Creating a scientific name doesn't "do" anything to the animal, and often other scientists will disagree with the the new name. Scientists will be looking for reasons to squash the "new" species name. In the case of the ELB there are arguments over the methods used, the regular guppies that the comparisons were made with, the form of the gonopodium, etc. etc..

The classical definition of species ( By definition it applies only to organisms which reproduce sexually...) was proposed by Ernst Mayr in 1942, defining it as reproductively isolated groups of organisms. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others.

This is known as the "biological species definition" - An animal is a member of that species if, mated to another member of the species, they produce offpring which are in turn capable of producing offspring of that species.

The offspring of a horse and donkey, or a tiger and lion, goat and sheep, are sterile (almost all the time), because horses and donkeys, and tigers and lions, etc. are members of different species.

( That makes this offspring the REAL hybrids...not the crosses between guppy and ELB, that are NO hybrids in the classical sense..)

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Location of Wild Guppy outside South-Amerika

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