Female Guppies Don't Want Their Man Looking Like Their Ex

Unlike most fickle cereal daters, female guppies don't seem to have a "type," given one condition. The male they select just absolutely cannot look like the last male they courted with.

That's according to a study recently published in the journal Ethology that details how female guppy fish will utterly lose interest in males of a certain appearance after mating with them in as little as seven minutes.

Male guppies are certainly a startling group, with a wide variety of colors, patterns, and even sizes.

Nature World News previously reported how exceptionally unique male guppies with the most flair were, the most likely to have many mates in their lifetime. Now, with this latest study, that makes a bit more sense, where an especially unique male will have little chance of looking like a female guppy's ex-lover.

Kimberly Hughes of Florida State University, who led the recent study, introduced single female guppies to a group of four males. These males were one of two types of body coloration and patterning - as if two pairs of gentlemen showed up to a cocktail party in matching blazers. (Scroll to read on...)

Almost immediately after the first interaction, the female guppy was found to be utterly disinterested in the male who looked just like the one who had courted her. Hughes suggests that this occurs because female guppies are trying to get as diverse a selection of genetic features for their offspring as possible.

"It's possible for multiple males to fertilize a female's eggs," Hughes explained to New Scientist, going on to add that a single brood can be sired by up to 12 different fathers.

Another theory is that the females may be wired with such an aversion to "same" to help avoid inbreeding - which can have some adverse genetic consequences.

Anne Houde, who was involved in the study, also suggests that it could simply be a consequence of the limitations of the guppy brain, in which females have trouble telling one similar male from another. In that case, lady guppies would be disinterested in similar males simply because they think they are the same one in a "I already got that one," kind of phenomenon.

Amazingly, thanks to the guppies' picky taste in males, Hughes and her colleagues have hypothesized that after a mere 24 hours in your standard guppy environment, all the males are familiar to the females, leading to an unceremonious end to the hot guppy dating scene.