One of the reasons why the guppy hobby always never fail to get me excited and involved is the fact that there are always new strains and new discoveries in the guppy world. There is always something new that you can discover while browsing the web or while visiting your nearby local fish store. Sometimes, even those guppies that are meant for the predatory fishes or often known as feeder guppies can throw in some surprises. I remembered a particular visit to a local fish shop of mine that offered such surprises. I was looking at a tank of guppies that were selling for one Singapore dollar and these guppies looked very similar and I thought that they were of the same strain. It is apparaent that they were crossbreeds of 2 types of local Singapore guppies that you can easily find in Singapore fish farms.

However, these guppies were special in the sense that the colour separation between blue and red was distinct. It had neon blue bodies that spread all the way to hald the tail. Then the other half of the tail leading all the way to the tail’s edge is red in colour. There were no female guppies for sale and I guess you would know why. The Singapore guppy farmers are very protective of their strains and they wouldn’t want any of their strains being bred by another competing guppy farmer. Hence why I sometimes have a couple of females from so called “neutral” strains to crossbreed with exceptional males that I find by accident in the local fish store.

Anyway, back to the topic of how can we find new strains to oogle at and even try our luck at getting our hands on new guppy strains. I have basically 3 ways for you to reach that goal:

1. Join a Guppy club

One of the best ways to find new guppy strains is to join a guppy club. When you join a guppy club, you will meet fellow breeders that are as passionate as you in the breeding and upkeep of guppies. Myself, I joined the Singapore Guppy Club and had the opportunity to network with other guppy breeders from all walks of life, congregating because of the love of keeping fancy guppies. I found out that guppy breeders have their own favorite strains to work with. In Singapore, the full red guppy strain is one strain that is very popular with the breeders. It could be that red is an auspicious colour here in Asia and that the strain is fairly new to the guppy world, hence possessing that quality of being rare, highly prized and hence desired by many breeders here. The Blue Grass and Red Lace guppies are also popular here with the breeders in Singapore. I also noticed that some breeders were just happy breeding and improving on 2 to 3 strains while others have more than 10 strains in their breeding room. There are also breeders who keep on experimenting with crosses and these are the type of guppy breeders that you would find some interesting guppies that would tickle your curiosity. Nevertheless, be prepared to also come across breeders that are secretive and prefer to meet you at another place than at their breeding room so that you won’t know what they have cooking in their breeding rooms.

You could also acquire new guppy strains at auctions and fish shows run by the guppy club. Some breeders would allow the fishes that they have on show auctioned off at the end of the show. Most times, the monies would be donated to the club itself. Also, on every Singapore Guppy Club guppy show, I noticed that guppy breeders donated their fishes to be sold by the club’s committee in order to raise funds for the club. You could do some asking and find out where these fishes came from and what the strain history is. The club administrators would usually give the breeder’s contacts too so that you can liaise with them directly if you had any bugging questions that you need answered regarding the trio or pair of guppies that you bought.

During one of the shows, I also met up with one guppy breeder from Penang, Malaysia. He was a fine chap but didn’t speak much. I enquired on the strains that he had at the moment and he gave me a list of strains that he had for sale. He had some guppies entered in the show and I guess was there to also gauge how the quality of guppies are at that moment in Singapore. I managed to get from him some him some Tuxedo guppies with fairly clear white tails with strong robust bodies to go with. I paid for the fishes on the spot and the fishes from Penang came to my doorstep the next week. I was grateful to him for his fast delivery and the fact that he gave me females that were ready to drop in a week or two. From that trio, I got a whole tankful of beautiful tuxedos that I think, I could never have gotten easily in Singapore. Here is his web site: Penang Guppies

2. Look at the ads of Guppies for sale on Aquabid
I would often visit aquabid. If you haven’t known about the site, let me try to explain what the site offers. It is basically the ebay for people who wants to sell surplus fishes that they have and also the selling of aquatic equipment. The breeders that are selling the guppies on aquabif can come from the far east from countries like Thailand and Malaysia to Western guppy breeders residing in the US or even Europe. The Thai breeders seems to like this site a lot and use this site to sell their fishes which they breed in farms in the east.

I had also occasionally chanced upon some well known breeders with prize winning fishes putting their prized beauties for sale. Good specimens on aquabid will usually get bidded to a high price and usually the pictures of these fishes would also show that these are fishes of true lineage and had been cared for like royalty. Below are some pictures that I manage to get from aquabid with permission from the owners of course. Anyway, the pictures below are Blue Moscow Gold Pastel crosses and they have been bidded by quite a number of breeders already. To be exact, these fishes received 10 bids.

Golden moscow guppies

Blue Moscow Guppies

Anyway, here is the link to the bidding page: link

3. Search the Web
One of the best ways to search for new guppies is of course by googling for it. You will be surprised by the number of new strains of guppies that you can find on some of the websites managed by guppy breeders from all over the world. I suggest that you send them a friendly email. You can also ask them whether they have any surplus guppies that they have bred for sale, Most will tell you that they can ship their guppies overseas. However, you do need to go through the details of how the whole process of shipping will be like with the breeder. A good reputable guppy breeder would usually have exported their fishes worldwide or at least on several occasions.

I would also advice you to join guppy forums. These are places where guppy breeders and enthusiasts congregate. They share guppy pictures, experiences and most would help you to point to the right direction if you required some help on finding a particular guppy strain. But, you have to be patient if you are looking for some exotic strain that only seem to appear in the public every few years.

here are two guppy forums that I have been a part of. One is based in the US and the other one is based in Singapore.

1. Guppies.com (US Based)

2. Arofanatics (Singapore Based)

You will meet some serious guppy breeders on these 2 forums and I think they would help you also find the guppy strain of your dreams.

i hope the information that I have provided above would help you find your surreal guppy strain. If you can’t find any that fits your taste, why not try breeding your own unique strain of guppies? It would be very satisfying and if you had read my previous posts, it really had made my life more enriching too.

To your guppy breeding success!

~Ardy Ishykiel~

Blue Lace Guppy

Blue lace guppies pictures have been appearing on the internet. There have been reports that the strain have been put on sale on Aquabid. I am very sure that this strain will be a best seller and will be popular with guppy enthusiast the world over. Who can resist the intricate lacy patterns against a backdrop of blue? I myself have been intriqued by blue guppy strains and blue happens to be my favorite colour too.

It was said tha the Blue Lace guppies that were offered on aquabid were F1 fries from a German Red Lace Snakeskin Crossed with the  Japan Blue guppy. It was a cross that was made by Darryl Tsutsui of Hawaii and a guppy enthusiast did try to contact the breeder but to no avail. If the breeder of this guppy ever gets to read this post, maybe you can drop me an email so that I can let others know about the developments of this strain and how they can acquire the Blue Lace Guppies. Those that have seen the guppy pics stated that the Blue Lace guppies had a partial very faint snake pattern in the body which was in its early stage of development.  This is quite common for snakeskin or lace type guppies as the lace patterns and the snakeskin patterns too will take some time to develop and is closely related to how well the fishes have been kept in terms of water quality and food quality provided to them.

Other breeders working on this strain have pointed out that the yellow colour is the main enemy in their breeding program as it is quite hard for them to eliminate that colour from the fishes that they were breeding. This is the description given by a fellow breeder.

The fish were otherwise very nice,and a few had light blue caudals with yellow near the peduncle covering maybe 30 percent of the total caudal area.If I had tank space I might have tried to work with them,but it seems like the yellow that comes with the pastel blau in my fish is hard to eliminate.If they had the nice pastel blue without the yellow,I might have tried to work them.Others had yellow lace caudals with pink and pastel purplish overtones,mostly on upper and lower edges.I did not try breeding those males as the lace snake pattern was incomplete,some had 80+ percent lace,some had only 50% good lace pattern distributed fairly evenly on the caudal,but random areas were just missing the lace pattern. It will be interesting if you get similar results.

Another breeder from Singapore have also been trying to produce Blue Lace Guppies. A picture of his pictures can be seen below.

Blue Lace Guppies F2 Singapore

Sorry about the pictures but these are thebest pictures that I have at the moment of these guppies. It was first seen at the  recent Guppy Club Singapore (GCS) mini-competition held on 13th Dec. in Singapore. The hobbyist who submitted these fishes for the competition is only known as YS and he has entereda pair of blue lace snakeskins. Another breeder managed to  got in touch with him and had actually managed to purchased a trio of these fishes from the breeder.

You might be interested in the details of these fishes. The fishes were acquired by a Malaysia breeder who got the fishes from a Taiwanese guppy breeder. YS then bought the Blue Lace snakeskin gupies from the Malaysian breeder in March 2008. The trio that he got were the F2’s. From that batch, there were only 3 males that bear some resemblance to the lace patterns while the rest were more akin to cobra phenotypes. As you can see from the picture above, the guppies are awashed with yellow colour and that needs some fixing and some skillful breeding and genetics.

I believe that the strain can be fixed and it is a matter of time that the strian becomes more easily acquired. But like the Red Lace Guppies, the better strains and specimens would not come cheap. These guppies can command a high price tag and I believe that it is fair for the breeder to charge a high price as the skill and time involved in getting a strain to a certain standard is huge. Not only that, it also takes a lot of committment from the breeder to continue working on a single strain to perfection. It’s pure discipline.

If you are someone who is breeding Blue Lace guppies or other lace type guppies, don’t hesitate to email me about your stories. I would love to hear about them and I would love to publish your exciting stories on my blog.

To your guppy breeding success!

~Ardy Ishykiel~

Pretty Pink Guppies

In this post, I am going to talk about some pink guppies that I manage to get hold of from a local fish shop in Singapore. They have been appearing in the fish shops on a consistent basis and I think the breeder is a Guppy farmer here in Singapore.

In my opinio, the above guppies are a cross between Japanese Blue Guppies and the the Red Grass strain. I might be wrong but if I have my reasons to actually state the above.

One is the observation that if you look closely at the Caudal fins of the pink guppy, you will see scattered black spots that are very characteristic of the Grass strains and reminiscence of the Red Grass guppy strain.

Another possible cross is a strain which I would just refer to as the Red Delta strain that is a common sight here in Singapore and is bred in big numbers here in Singapore Guppy farms.

The above is just some speculation and observation. I might be wrong, really wrong and I would really appreciate it if anyone who has had some experiences with these guppies help to enlighten us a bit on the genetic makeup of this fish and how it was developed.

-Ardy Ishykiel-

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

Planted Tank of mine

I started this Blog so that I can share with all who are interested in Guppies the exploits in my the Guppy hobby and now people, I have a Guppy room. It is something which I had always wanted since young, a Guppy Room to keep my guppies and breed them for traits that would make them special.

I have been breeding guppies for as long as I can remember. It was way back in 1992 actually. My first tank was a plastic Guppy brand tank and guess where I got my first guppies? From the local fish shop of course. Nope…not the longkang (Malay word for small drains or monsoon drains) as I believe that the longkang guppies are far from the sophisticated Fancy Guppies that swim with the grace of angels.

Anyway, to keep the long story short. I hope that you enjoy the stuff that I have uploaded here. Please leave your comments whenever possible and don’t forget to email me here. Also, if you want to know more about guppies or would want to get in touch with me. I will share with you whatever information that I have learned and gathered over the years. It never fails to make me happy when I have more people becoming friends from something as simple as Guppies.

Just if you were wondering on the picture above, it is a 5 feet planted tank that I have right smack between my kitchen and living room. I have spent countless hours doing that tank and had started trying to setup a planted tank way back when I couldn’t find a simple CO2 canister and fertilizers for the plants. I never gave up and the industry actually caught up with me and now you can actually do up a planted tank fast once you know what to do, what to get and where to get it. I am quite “blessed’ to be a hobbyist in Singapore as the local fish shop here in Singapore do stock up the equipment needed for me to be successful in this hobby.

Happy Guppy Keeping
-Ishykiel-