Loads of babies now.

The natural selection method is turning out to be much more successful than moving the fry to a seperate tank.

In the tank we have at least 10 fry of varying ages and stages of development. The tank is also showing to be a really good environement for breeding snails as well. This weekend I am going to have to clear out some of the snails as they are over running the tank.

The video below shows how wekk the tank is doing:

More Fry

Just a quick update we now have another 5-6 fry of varying ages as well as the original 3 fry. The 3 original fry are now big enough to swim around with the adults without fear of being eaten so are not hiding any more. They are also starting to get color in their tails.

Fry update

Been watching the tank closely for the last week and definately have 3 fry still alive. One is a bit of a ninja and is always hiding in the plants where as the other 2 are braver and stay in open water and around the adults at feeding time.

When they get a little bigger I will take some photos.

Still have Fry

Been watching the tank and until now I have only see 3 fry. Just seen them now so they seem to be getting on OK.

Got new Fry

Last Monday I noticed that one of the adult females had died. Then later that day I noticed that there was a fry in the tank. Today I notice another fry swimming around in the tank. I am guessing that the new fry was hiding in the plants as it is the same size as the original fry that I had been watching for the last week. I will keep a close eye on the tank for the next couple of days to see if any more fry com out of hiding at feeding time.

Plants arrived

The plants that I ordered last week arrived today. I have put them into my 2 tanks and now my guppy tank has loads of cover for the fry to hide from the adults so lets see if I get better results from the natural selection method.

The only thing that I have noticed is that the tank is now quite dark so it looks like I may have to buy a light  but I will see how it goes. The fish seen to be happy so not sure.

Here is how the tank looks now:

Fry died

The fry that I found last week dies over the weekend.

Over the weekend I have been looking into getting a bigger communal tank of 200 litres (100cm x 40cm x 50). I am waiting for the company who makes the tanks to get back to me with the price o delivery. I have also bought 10 different plants to go in the new aquarium when I get it.

I have decided that I am going to use the natural selection method to rear the fry as it is much less hastle.

Hopefully over this week I will get the new tank and filter and stuff and set it up to settle then in a week or so I will move some of my existing fish into the new aquarium to cycle it for 8 weeks then move the rest of the fish.

I am also looking for other fish to stock the tank with as well as guppies. I am thinking of neon tetras as my wife really likes them also want to get some shrimp to keep the tank clean and maybe a Leopard sailfin pleco and a catfish.

First Baby arrived today

Was looking at the fish when I fed them just now and noticed a baby at the bottom of the tank. I have moved it into the nursery tank on its own and I have put a fry trap into the main tank with food in it to see if there are any more fry hiding anywhere. The trap is basically a plastic water bottle which was cut in half with a couple of small holes drilled in the lid. the lid end is then stuffed into the middle of the base end to form a funnel.

I will check the trap later to see if I have caught any more fry.

Quick update

The new fish havê settled in really well. The small fish havê more than doubled in size and the existing females are getting really fat só i think that the males are doing their job.

I AM also getting used to the more frequent water chances. The first few chances the old water was smelling bit now i havê been changing 1.5 l of water every 2 days the water doesnt smell any more.

I still havent any more news on the new tank that the fish shop is selling me i am going to go there tomorrow to chase them up.

All settled in

The new fish are all settled in now. Did my first partial water change this morning although the water in the tank was not smelling at all. The original 5 females are all looking much better with the addition of the males. Their tails seem much more vibrant than before.

Now it is a case of wait and watch to see if and when the females get pregnant.

New Guppies Arrived

The new guppies have all arrived safely. This post will show the process of slow acclimatization that the breeder recommended before adding the new fish to the existing tank. The breeder Marcio had sent 3 extra fish as some of the females were younger than he had advertised online, to be honest this didn´t really bother me too much as I already had 5 mature females in the aquarium and the younger females will help to replace these females when they get older.

The first step is to place the fish in the bags they traveled in floating in the aquarium to get the temperature of the water that the fish are in to the same temperature as the aquarium water.

The bag are then left for 20 minutes.

The next step was to open the tops of all the bags and put 20 ml´s of the aquarium water in each bag and leave them to sit for a further 20 minutes.

After the first 20 ml of aquarium water was added you could see that the fish in the bags started to wake up and move around more. They seemed to be aware of the other fish in the aquarium that they were not aware of when the bags were first put in the aquarium.

This was especially true of male guppies, I am not sure if there were hormones from the female fish in the aquarium or not but they definitely were trying to chase the existing females through the bags.

This process was repeated a further 5 times leaving 20 minutes between adding water from the bags with the fish into the aquarium.

Here is a quick video showing the fish eating.

When I ordered the fish I was planning to put 3 guppies in the betta tank (1 male and 2 females) and the rest in the other tank but unfortunately this will not work as the betta is too agressive towards the other fish! I tries to put one of the existing guppies in the tank this morning at the betta chassed it around the tank until I took it out! I am currently negotiating with the aquarium shop in town to sell me one of their big tanks as they have an even bigger one to install. I think the tank is around 80-100 gallon tank that I am planning to setup as the community tanks with plants (if I can find any!!) and decorations to house the guppies with some other fish such as neons and some bottom feeders and maybe some shrimp. I plan to use the bigger of the 2 existing tanks as a fry tank with no gravel and just the filter and a few stones on the bottom. The smaller tank is going to be moved to my sons room with the betta in it I think he wants to put blue gravel on the bottom but that is up to him and his pocket money.

Project Guppy

A couple of months ago while setting up my office in the Garage I decided to sort out the old aquarium that we had in the front hallway without any fish in it.

The aquarium was an old one that a friend of ours had given us when he went back to Oz. I was a small 5 gallon tank that he had kept a couple of fish that he had caught in the local river. Ones the fish had died that he gave to us with the aquarium had died I had cleaned and sterilized the tank and set it up for a betta that I had bought from the local pet shop with my son who was about 5 at the time. After 3 dead bettas in 3 month I went to another pet shop in the next town and bought 6 guppies as a surprise for my son as I knew that guppies are much hardier.

These fish lasted another year and once they died the tank stayed in the hall with a robo-fish in it. Some-how 4 months ago the robo fish escaped and has not been seen since!!!!!

As I was setting up my home office I decided to move the tank into the office to give me something to look at when I was thinking things over or getting stressed out.

After cleaning the aquarium out boiling the gravel and setting it up again I left the aquarium to cycle for a month and then added 3 female guppies to the tank. After another month we bought 2 more female guppies and a female beta as there were no more guppies left as it was winter at the time and the shop only had these fish left over.

All was good until last month when I went into the office one morning and found that one of the guppies was with half of its tail missing!!! I ran out and bought a new 6 gallon tank as it was the biggest tank that the shop had available. I also bought gravel and a under gravel filtration.

I cleaned out the tank and boiled and cleaned the gravel and set the tank up using half of the water from the original aquarium and half with water that had been treated and left sitting for 2 days. Once the new aquarium was set up I moved the 5 guppy females to the new aquarium and left the beta on its own in the old tank.

A couple of weeks ago one of the guppies had babies but before we saw there was only one left. I managed to show the remaining baby to my son who is now 7 nearly 8 who got really exited. unfortunately the remaining fry didn't last more than an hour before the adults ate it!

After talking to my son we decided that we would like to get more guppies and try and bread them. When I first got married we had a bigger 30 gallon tank that my parents gave us that was full of guppies and every month there seemed to be more fry so I knew that breading guppies is easy to do.

I tried to buy some male guppies from the local pet stores but they only stock beta!!! even the store that I bought the original guppies from had´t bought any new stock as he was concentrating more on birds than  fish now.

With this I decided to buy some more guppies on the intenet which we have done and they should arrive today.