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.