Guppy

🌍 Overview

The guppy is a small, prolific livebearing fish native to the streams and rivers of northeastern South America and the Caribbean. Named after naturalist Robert John Lechmere Guppy, who submitted specimens to the British Museum in the 1860s, guppies have since become one of the most widely kept and selectively bred aquarium fish in the world, with countless color and finnage varieties developed by hobbyists. They have also been introduced globally as a natural mosquito-control agent, since they readily eat mosquito larvae.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

The common name honors a man whose scientific name lost. Wilhelm Peters had already described the species from Venezuela as Poecilia reticulata in 1859, seven years before Albert Gunther coined Girardinus guppii, so the honorific was a junior synonym almost from the start. The fish also passed through Lebistes reticulatus, assigned by Charles Tate Regan in 1913, before Rosen and Bailey restored the original name in 1963. In the late 1970s John Endler moved guppies from a predator-heavy stretch of Trinidad's Aripo River to a site upstream that predators could not reach, and the color patterns of the transplanted population shifted measurably, giving field biology one of its standard demonstrations of selection at work.

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