Sentences with word «swordtail»

When Schumer began working with species of swordtail fish in Mexican rivers about six years ago, scientists still thought hybrids were rare among animals.

In the Calnali River in Mexico, two pure species of swordtail fish live side by side with a third population that's a mix of the original two.

Researchers examined the two pure swordtail species, Xiphophorus birchmanni and Xiphophorus malinche, as well as the hybrids, tagging the animals and extracting DNA to probe their mating patterns.

For Molly Schumer, a postdoctoral fellow in genetics and evolutionary biology at Harvard Medical School, the fellowship will help fund her research on how evolutionary forces affect our genes, focusing in particular on a persistent trait that can cause melanoma in swordtail fish.

Male northern swordtails attract females by virtue of their size and swordlike tail appendages.

Striped swordtails and monarchs, grass yellows and redtops?

To see if the presence of UV signals mattered to female swordtails or Mexican tetras, the investigators put the fish in aquariums with illumination that mimicked natural underwater light conditions and filters that either blocked or permitted UV light.

Kenny Prince, the club man, can do anything for the Lockheed hobbyists from prescribing a tonic for the aquarium club's sick swordtails to finding a boat mold for the sport fishermen.

While northern swordtails tend to lack colors visible to humans, behavioral ecologists Molly Cummings and Michael Ryan of the University of Texas, Austin, and Gil Rosenthal of Boston University Marine Program in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found that the fish have substantial diversity in ultraviolet (UV) markings.

The interbreeding between those species probably took place more than 2,500 generations ago, though swordtails in other rivers have hybridized more recently.

«We weren't clear at the time if [hybridization] was something weird about swordtails,» she says, «but it's becoming clear that many species groups are that way.»

And by recent, Schumer means that hybridization became the rage among two species of Mexican swordtails just within the last 20 to 30 years (SN Online: 5/21/14).

Male Hawaiian swordtail crickets (Laupala cerasina) know how to get their women in the mood.

Platyfish have a so - called tumor gene and a regulator to control it, whereas swordtails have neither.

You can combine swordtails, platies and mollies; just adjust the water to the alkaline side.

Striped swordtails and monarchs, grass yellows and redtops — all the butterflies — flitted leisurely from one flower to the next... As for us, we moved about in that unhurried way of the butterflies, as if the breeze was sweet, as if the sun on our skin was a caress.

The team wants to run more genetic tests to determine if the inheritance patterns in crossbreeding coral trout might be the same as they are in the offspring of swordtail - platyfish matings.

When the researchers took UV photographs of five swordtail species, they found that UV ornamentation is most prominent in males of species that inhabit regions with lots of Mexican tetras.

For more than 20 years, researchers have suggested that private messages could help animals like the swordtail show off for potential mates while avoiding unwelcome carnivorous attention.

The swordtail fish Xiphophorus nezahualcoyotl inhabits certain rivers in Mexico (green shows range).

In other streams nearby lives the swordtail, which looks much the same, although the males lack spots and have a long tail.

The way to a woman's heart is through her stomach — at least for the swordtail characin.

They breed a swordtail and a platyfish, both common pets, to create offspring that are more sensitive to UV light.

A relatively hardy and easy to care for livebearer, the swordtail is one of the most popular aquarium fish species among beginner aquarists.

For example, a retailer that commonly stocks six varieties of swordtails — velvet, brick, gold wag, brick tuxedo, velvet lyretail and green — may want to give customers a more diversified choice by replacing three of these with pineapple tux, brick wag and marigold lyretail.

Really, only platies and swordtails are perfect, with mollies a distant second due to their water chemistry demands.

If you browse around online, especially on Facebook, you will see a great many photos of exotic varieties of bettas, swordtails, guppies, glowfish, flowerhorns (cichlid hybrids), etc..

Let's not forget livebearers: swordtails, platies, mollies, guppies and even a few oddball species.