As much as we would like our guppies to eat and eat and eat so that they would grow into large beautiful fishes that we yearn for, there are days when our guppies just decided that would rather starve themselves to death.

I personally have faced this situation before and have thought to myself what may be causing these guppies to stop eating the good food that I feed them. I use top quality fish food and present to my guppies a variety of food so that they do not get “bored” with the food.

I have therefore compiled a few reasons to explain why they are doing the Gandhi fasting session.

5 Reasons why guppies starve themselves include:

1. They are sick and need treatment.

2. There is something wrong with the water in which they are in.

3. Your filter has been unchanged for too long and needs to be cleaned.

4. The lighting around the tank is scaring them with the ghoulish shadows that is created.

5. The food that you are offering to your guppies lack variety.

The first reason why guppies starve themselves is that they are sick and need treatment. This is one of the main reasons why guppies stop eating. They may be swimming happily today and just stop eating altogether when they are suffering from diseases such as a fungal infection, viral attacks, parasitical attacks, etc. If you notice that they are suffering from a particular disease, do treat your guppies as soon as possible and do monitor the situation well so that your guppies do not get treated with the wrong medication and that they are responding to the treatment given.

The second reason why guppies starve is that there is something truly wrong with their tank water. Sometimes, my guppies appetite start to waver after their water has been changed. Nevertheless, they should get out of the fasting mood within an hour or two. If they still look quirky and refuse to eat the food that is given to them, I suggest that you check the quality of water in your tank. Water that has just been changed could be rich in certain chemicals such as chlorine and chloramine and these elements could harm your dear guppies. Get a chlorine or chloramine remover if you suspect that this is what is causing them to stop eating.

The 3rd reason could be due to unchanged and clogged up filter. I use a corner filter which contains wool and some river stones to weigh the filter down. The good thing about using these filters is that they tell you when they need to be changed by just looking at how black the wool has become. You need to know that a filter that has been aged is a good thing for the tank as the nitrifying bacteria could have already colonized them and therefore able to do the good job of keeping the water clean from ammonia and other harmful elements. However, you wouldn’t want your filter to be too clogged up and left for too long without being changed. The poisonous elements in the filter could have reached its maximum level and there is no more space for the filter to take in any more of those stuff without spilling it back into the tank. So, if I were you, and I start seeing that my guppies looking listless and not eating, I would check whether I had kept up to date with the filter being changed. I wouldn’t want my guppies to die because of my inability to keep up to date with the filter cleaning schedule.

The 4th reason involves the environment and the ambience around the tank. You would be surprised that by just changing the location of a particular tank, your guppies would do better and even eat more! I notice that my guppies that are kept at the waist level or eye level tend to do much better than those that are kept at the lowest levels or near the floor. I believe that its got to do with the lighting conditions and the shadow that is being created as we go around those tanks. In the wild, fishes are just simply wary of shadows from the top and any sudden shadows appearing from the top would be taken as a potential predator lurking around to search for prey. This is the kind of reaction that we get from our guppies when they are at a location that seem to get the most of these kind of shadows. Guppies in this situation will cower at the edge of the tank and they would sometimes refuse food as they are just too scared out of their wits to eat! If you happen to face this situation, make sure that you get the tank or displace these guppies to another location that is brighter and have lesser shadows.

Only put “seasoned” guppies at the lower levels of your available tank space and monitor them closely. For me, I use my lower level tanks to put females that ae about to give birth as they are usually put into a breeding cage and the cage is usually covered with a cardboard to prevent them from jumping out and also has the added advantage of preventing unnecessary shadows from appearing.

You might think that only humans get bored of the food that they eat on a daily basis. Then, surprise yoursel with this information that guppies too get tired of the same food being fed to them. This is epecially true if you feed the guppies dried food and nothing else. If this happens to be the situation, I would advise you to provide your guppies with some fresher live food such as artemia salina or also known as brine shrimps. Hatch your own brine shrimps and your guppies will love you for it.

Do take note also that dried fish food have a shelve life. By this, it means that dried fish food that has been on the shelve for a tad too long might just be good for the decomposing bacteria and small black beetles that might just appear when the food has gone beyond the due date. Throw away old fish food and replace them with newer, fresher dried fish food or get some live fish food such as those yummy looking and moving shrimps to enliven and energise your guppies again.

I hope that you guppy keepers out there have learned something from this post. There could be more reasons to why a fish will not want to eat. If you think that there are other good reasons to explain this behaviour, do drop me a comment!

Cheers!

Ardy Ishykiel

An article appeared recently at LiveScience.com which stated that female guppies do go through menopause just like human beings.

A new study finds that guppies experience menopause just like humans and other animals. The study is the first demonstration of menopause in fish and raises the question of why some female animals live beyond their fertile years at all.

The article suggest that guppies experience menopause and they wonder why the guppies that experience menopause should even exist after that as they have already so called fulfill their duties as guppies to propagate the species.

I think that the scientists are looking too much into evolutionary theory and darwinism. Why can’t they live longer than their reproductive life span? I mean, the female guppies could be fulfilling other roles after their reproductive age and which could impact on the guppy eco system as a whole. These infertile female guppies could be the ones steering away the predators from attacking the younger guppies as first, they are more visible and second they are bigger and faster than the younger ones to allow more chance for escape. As such, their role could have changed from reproducer to one of a defender to the rest of the guppy population.

Anyway, let me share with you my experiences with keeping female guppies that have passed their reproductive prime. I agree with the article that female guppies experience menopause as I have kept female guppies that are more than a year old and have stopped reproducing altogether. I noticed this in the older female guppies that tend to grow larger after they have stopped reproducing.

My only qualm is that these large female guppies keep on eating and eating and not reproduce at all after that (Fish food prices seems to be increasing too these days). I also notice that they grow really huge, horizontally, and their stomachs remain slim even after eating huge amounts of the food that I have given them. I can’t bear to cull these guppies as I appreciate their size and the beauty of these guppies on its own right. Some of my guppy friends are amazed by the size of these females and wonder what I had done to get these guppies to these huge size. Well I told them that these darlings of mine are fed with “Super Growth” food that is specially prepared in my kitchen. I was joking with them as I know for sure from my observation that these guppies have reached the menopausal stage and will usually grow large after reaching this stage.

That is why sometimes, I see some of these huge guppies in a bag with all the other feeder fishes. I guess, guppy farmers too have realized that it doesn’t make any sense to their bottom line by keeping large female guppies that produce no young.

I wonder why they call a strain of guppies “Old Fashion”? I mean, is it because they have been around for too long, looked out of fashion when compared to the latest of strains that has appeared in the guppy world and as such be termed as “old”?
I try to make sense of the term Old Fashion Guppies and I feel that these beauties still have a place in the guppy world and are much prized all over the world. Call them old fashion or New Age guppies, they are still guppies that pack a punch in terms of coloration and vivacity.

The picture that I have posted above is of a pair of Old Fashion Albino Mosaic guppies. The picture above was taken at the 2008 guppy competition. Don’t gag on the name as these guppies do contain within themselves a myriad of genes and to produce these guppies from scratch would clearly need an individual with patience of steel.

I really am not too sure why the Old fashion guppies are named as such but from reading various sources of guppy information, I found out that they are believed to be of Southeast Asian and Japanese origin. Most believe that these guppies are called “Old Fashion” because they have a body pattern which is more typical of the wild guppy than todays lines.

However, according to one breeder, this guppy strain have tail patterns that tend to stay within the green, red and black colors. I believe however, that the “Old Fashion” guppies is distinctive than the rest of the strains not due to their tail patterns but rather because of their body patterns. It is in their body patterns that you see close resemblance to the wild type. The wild type guppies have so called “patches” of colour and some of these patches show more sheen than the other patches. These “irregular” shaped patches is distinctive in the wild as well as the delta tailed Old Fashioned guppies.

Some guppy enthusiasts believe that the term “Old-Fashion” is a name given by Japanese breeders and they believe that the strain has direct relations to the Viennese Emerald Green Double sword and the more typical pattern is closer to the wild guppy in its polychromatic variability than most modern strains. The term Polychromatic is used to described “light that exhibits more than one color “and when we use the term in relation to guppies, I hold the view that it used to relate to the guppies body that contains more than one color. This is especially observed in the wild color types and the Old Fashion guppies. It is interesting to note also that the old-fashioned gene is strongly Y-linked. You could then in theory develop all kinds of Guppy strains with the Old Fashion gene when you take into account that the tail color can be X and Y linked.

To me, the Old Fashion guppy is an interesting strain and is a strain that has a huge potential for development. If you are someone willing to take the challenge, I am always interested to interview you on your experience keeping and breeding the Old Fashion guppy.

Happy guppy keeping!

Ishykiel

This time around, I would like to share with all of you pictures of my Metal Yellow Ocelot Guppies. These small sized fishes seems to be more popular with the Japanese guppy breeders. A few sites that I visited proved the case.

Here in Singapore, the smaller sized guppies, I feel are not as treasured as their bigger tailed delta cousins. Most of the “mini” sized guppies are kept by planted tank enthusiasts as inhabitants in their carefully crafted planted paradise. Some Singapore breeders do keep this fishes but seldom do show them in competitions.

I observe that small sized guppies seems to appear more colourful than their bigger sized cousins. That got me thinking. Are guppies like LCD telivisions?

You know, when you go to an electronics store and you approach a sales person about buying an LCD television and he says that if you get bigger televisions, the color will not be as vivid as a smaller sized television. I figured that this theory could be working true for guppies as well!

Anyway, we know that bigger does not always mean better. (Which might be true for cars nowadays, especially with the gasoline prices increasing.)

Due to their small size, these guys are hyper and pack a ton of energy. They remind me also of the cartoon Atom Ant. These guys are very active buggers and swim real fast. In relation to that, I notice that they are more able to impregnate the females. The females being bigger in size and being slower swimmers can hardy get rid of the males that try to do their best to help the species multiply.

As such, if you were to keep Ocelots, please do have a proper ratio of males to females. The ratio of 1 is to 1 would be good and the maximum ratio would be 2 males for 1 female. These guys chase the females like crazy and you would be doing your female Ocelot guppies a favor by not stressing them up with hyper male Ocelots that just don’t know when to give up.

The females give birth to about 30 fries and they breed often. You can end up with a lot of Ocelots if you allow the sexes to mix. I therefore would suggest that you separate the male Ocelot guppies and the female Ocelot guppies. Just select the male Ocelot guppy of your choice and a large stocky female to ensure that you will have the next generation of Ocelot guppies to carry on the strain.

For short tailed guppies, they show close resemblance to the wild type guppies. I figured that this has given an advantage to the short tailed strain of guppies. Being closer related to the wild type, they are more resilient and hardy. Therefore, if you are looking for a strain of guppies that is easier to care for and fit your busy schedule, you would want to try keeping these short tailed beauties.

Being easier to keep and to a particular extent easier to breed, I would recommend these guppies to a beginner and planted tank enthusiast.

Happy guppy keeping!

Ishykiel