El Silverado endler

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Care at a glance

Overview

The El Silverado endler is a silver endler line for a peaceful community tank. It is easy to keep and a good choice for a beginner.

Caring for the El Silverado endler

A small colony of El Silverado endlers fits in a tank of 10 gal (38 L) or more. Plant the tank and add some floating plants. These active fish cruise the middle and upper water.

Hold the temperature at 72 to 86°F (22 to 30°C) and the pH at 6.5 to 7.5. A quality flake and micro pellets make the staple diet, with frozen brine shrimp or daphnia now and then.

El Silverado endlers are peaceful, safe company for other community fish. Keep more females than males to spread out the males' constant courtship and ease the stress on any one female. The line holds together only as long as it is kept away from guppies.

Males carry a silver body worked over with green and red, and dark spotting shows on some fish and not others. El Silverado endlers are livebearers that drop batches of fully formed fry, and they breed readily.

Good to know

The El Silverado endler's silver comes from iridophores, reflective cells that scatter light rather than carry a pigment of their own. That is why the color shifts with viewing angle and with the light over the tank, while the red and green stay put. For the same reason, judge stock by a shop's own photos. Most shops offer males only, and suppliers differ on how much red the line holds. Male pattern in Poecilia wingei is largely Y linked, so the look passes from father to son.

In the wild

The El Silverado line traces to fish found in 2013 around Cumana in Venezuela by Philippe Voisin. He is the collector behind several named endler lines in the hobby, including El Tigre. Cumana sits by the Laguna de los Patos system that most trade endlers descend from. The silver is described as a phenotype picked out of that population rather than a guppy cross, though shop stock is not always documented.

Common questions

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