Guppy is one of the most distributed fish species in the world. Usually, the Guppy is a small fish. A typical male guppy is about 1.2 – 3.5 cm long and a female one is about 3 to 6 cm long. A typical Guppy lives about 2 years. They are omnivorous animals. We also know Guppy as million fish or rainbow fish. Guppy is a freshwater fish species. Usually live in wild, aquariums and quiet places. The scientific name of the Guppy fish is Poecilia reticulata. Guppies breed quickly. But sometimes accidentally they eat there own little ones.
These Guppies are native to South America. There are 300 different types of guppies in the river of Amazon. But now they have spread all over the world. Fancy or regular Guppy, Endler guppy, Swamp guppy, Fantail guppy, Scarf tail, Veil tail guppy, Triangle tail and Double sword fold are some common species of the Guppies.
And guppies had used for some unique and surprising activities like eradicating malaria. This thing has happened in India. They have freed guppies for the water bodies to fight against malaria disease. That’s probably cool nuh?
Table of Contents
Tankmates suitable for guppies
Usually, guppies are calm. When setting up a tank for them, the tank must be at least about 5 gallons. And there must be some plants and other stuff. Also, there are some compatible fish types that you can keep with guppies. But don’t put incompatible fish together. Because they will fight each other and can make some injuries or some may die. So, I am pretty sure you don’t want to do that.
These are some excellent fish types you can put your guppies together with.
- Swordtails
- Mollies
- Platies
- Honey Gourami
- Cory catfish
- Endler’s Livebearer
- Glassfish
- Rasboras
These are some of them, and you can further get advice from experts in the guppy breeding.
Also, don’t forget to read our fish blog
Guppy breeding
When talking about the breeding of fish, people do it for many different aspects? Some people do it as a hobby, but others do it commercially. But we need to know what is the correct method before do it as a hobby, commercially or whatever the reason for it.
Guppies are ovoviviparous. Ovoviviparous means they give their young ones inside of eggs. Or they produce young ones like eggs. Ovoviviparous animals keep these eggs inside of their bodies. All the essential nutrients are within the eggs which need for the infant.
So let’s find out how we can breed guppies.
Breeding: Method
As mentioned above, there are some different intentions of breeding certain fish. It can be for commercial purposes or for your household purposes. Here we are going to only focus on the domestic breeding method. Which means you can get a basic idea about how to breed fish in your household tank.
Choose the fish
First thing you must consider about breeding fish is their colour, fin shapes and no. of fishes that are going to include in the breeding process. If you want a more colourful tank with different coloured and fish having different fin patterns, you must choose male and female fish with different characters. Otherwise, if you breed 2 same colour fish. The outcome is more likely to be the same as that.
Also, when putting males and females together for the mating process, do not put one male fish and female fish. Try putting about 3 to 4 females per male animal. Otherwise, the male one will be more aggressive, and the one and only female fish can be more stressed from that. So pay excellent attention to that fact.
Set up the tank
For this, you need tank about 15 gallons in size. And there must be a right heater and a filter. But keep in mind the screen should not be a powerful one. It should be a low powered one. The reason is that when it has higher power, small fish will die.
As mentioned in the top of this article, Guppies tend to eat their little ones or fry. To minimize this, we have to make some hiding spots inside the tank. Best way to do that is using floating plants. These floating plants stuff makes a perfect environment for baby guppies.
Wait for the results
And the next thing you have to do is wait until the thing happens. You must separate male one to the regular tank after female fish got pregnant. Pregnancy of the female Guppy can quickly identify by observing her abdominal area. You can see a dark confined spot in her abdominal area. They are eggs. Usually, the one-month period will take to give for the infants. Make sure you feed them with nutritional food within the whole process. Otherwise, the outcome will be not as healthy as you expected. This also goes to babies too. You need to feed them properly.
Remove the female Guppy
This is an essential thing you must to compulsorily. You need to separate the female from the small guppies. Because of some times, parent guppies eat their infants, we have to take this action. Otherwise, it’s not good to separate any animal from their parents. After those baby guppies grew enough, you can add them to the tank to live with their parent animals.
How to find the gender of a guppy fish
Here we have arrived in the last section of this article. In this section, we are going to find out the way how we can identify male and female guppies.
There are some morphological features of guppy fish that we can use to understand gender separately.
Size
Usually, the male one is small when compared to the female fish. It’s a very significant feature. Male guppy fish is more slender while the female one is more round. This is way better to identify the gender of guppies.
Normally, males are colourful
Usually, male guppies are more vivid than female ones. And they brighter colours when compared to the females. But this is not always valid since there are some species of guppies that have colourful female members.
Gravid spot
When strictly observed, there is a dark spot on the ventral side of the female guppies. Males do not have that feature.
Fin structure
Fin structure is also one way that you can use to identify the gender of the guppies. Usually, the dorsal fin on the upper side of the fish’s body of male guppies is more prolonged than female guppies.
The tail fin or caudal fin also have such variations. Usually, tail fins of males are widespread and more extended than of females. And the tail fin is more colourful in males than females.
The above factors are some morphological features that you can use to distinguish between male and female guppies.
So, that was it. I hope you’ll find something interesting and useful also you learnt something new. This information will help you start with fish breeding. An important thing we must consider regarding this process is, we have to provide the best environment and nutritional food for fish to get a quality outcome. Otherwise, we can’t expect the best results if we feed them with low quality food products. And some of these steps are crucial. If we don’t follow those properly, it’s a complete a vain of our time and lives of fish.
