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-

Lighting in your guppy room and for your guppy tanks is a must have. Most of us tend to downplay the importance of proper lighting for our guppies. For me, proper lighting is as important for the guppies as it is feeding them with the most nutritious food available.

My guppy room is lighted in such a way that the whole room receives light so that I can feel comfortable working in the fish room without banging into any of my tanks that I sometimes have to place on the floor (Due to over breeding on my part and not enough culling). I use 2 pieces of 2 feet long fluorascent Philips lamps in my room and they offer adequate lighting for the whole room.

I feel that it is important for the room to be lighted well so that the guppies do not get startled by the movements outside their tank. You know, we might seem like creepy invaders trying to stun them from behind if the room is kept dim. It also might frighten the guppies so much, to the point that they might just refrain from eating and start behaving strangely. Strange behaviours and unnatural behaviors in guppies always keep me on my toes and I try my best to make them feel at home as possible in their tanks as that encourages them to eat well and well fed guppies usually amount to nice big sized guppies that appeals to me and win shows!

Nice Planted Tank

Each of my guppy tanks have a 2 feet fluorascent lamp above them. The well lighted tanks is a pleasure to look at and the light is very much appreciated by the plants that live in some of my guppy tanks. I have Java Moss and other types of Moss in my tanks (We have quite a variety of moss varieties in Singapore that I have lose track oftheir names). I have used Hygrophilla plants to great effect to in my tanks and I can say that plants make a good addition to guppy fries that are growing up. I usually dont use plants in tanks where the guppies are above 2 months of age. I feel that the feeling of security that plants provide to guppies should be limited to a period of 2 months. I want my guppies to swim and dance beautifully in both bare or planted tanks.

Plants also provide other benefits besides looking nice in those tanks. As you would have already known, plants that photosynthasize produce lots of oxygen for out guppies and on top of that removes chemicals produced by our guppies as they process the food that they have eaten

With plants in the tanks, you need the lights to be on at least 10 hours a day. I use a timer for some of my tanks so that the lights can turned on and off at the most specific time that I want. Usually, I would have my lights on an hour before I feed my guppies and at least an hour after the guppies have been fed. I feel that with the lights on during feeding, you would allow the guppies to see better and hence allow them to feed more effectively (I hope that this does not make them more choosy eaters. Yikes!).

There have been times when too much light cause the water in the tank to become green, thanks and no thanks to algae. The algae will not usually harm the guppies but to me it is unsightly and I would not want any green water bubbling in my guppy tanks.

Some guppy farmers in Singapore though, just swear by green water in their guppy tanks and guppy ponds. They say that the guppies should be raised in as natural an environment as possible and be allowed to enjoy the green water. For me, I love the guppies because I can see them and I can appreciate them. Its ok if they are in ponds, but in my tanks, the clearer the water the better!

Nevertheless, the occurence of green water in my tanks is quite rare as my guppies are all kept indoors. If however, the green water does appear in your tanks, do not be afraid. A simple solution is available. Yes, a very simple one. What you should do is change a third of the water and off the lights for the next 3 days. That should do the trick. You do not have to change all the water in the tank as that can cause your guppies to suffer from stress (I never change all the water in my guppy tank. That is just inviting trouble.)

So, guppy people. Let there be light in your guppy room and in your guppy tanks. And may your guppies thrive under the best environments.

-Ardy Ishykiel-

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

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

In this post, I am gonna share with you guys my experience with a strain of Guppies known as the Japan Blue Guppies or also known as the Aquamarines.

Out of a line of Galaxies, it happened that a Japan Blue guppy came out from a batch of young. It became the first strain that I managed to fix. My thoughts is that the Galaxies were crossed with the Japan Blues to improve the Galaxy’s iridiscents and sheen. If I am not wrong, the Japan Blues characteristics are quite dominant and I guess some breeders might have figured out that they could improve another line’s colour and brilliance and in this case the Galaxies by out crossing them with the Japan Blue strain.

Why are they called Japan Blues, you might ask.

Most people say that the fish was developed in Japan, hence the name. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were actually bred in Japan. My perception of the Japanese in fish breeding is that they take what they do seriously and be quite meticulous when it comes to the details of doing things and achieving their objectives. I am not saying that other nationalities lack this sort of punch but the Japanese have shown that they can produce good fishes.

Anyway, let me tell you more about the Jap Blues. When I first got the male Jap Blue from the Galaxies, I managed to cross it with its sister which happens to be a female Galaxy. The resulting F1 turned out to be approxiamtely a 50-50 ratio of Jap Blue males and Galaxy males. From this batch, I chose a Jap Blue male and crossed it with its sister and continued doing this. By F3, I managed to fix the Jap Blue line. All the Japan Blues that came out from here onwards looked quite similar in terms of colour and size. Most however, did not have a good dorsal size and shape and this is one area that could be worked on if I had enough tanks and space.

One interesting thing to note is that there were no physical or colour difference between a female Galaxy guppy and a female Japan Blue guppy. I find this really interesting and was wondering whether the Japan Blue guppy characteristic only shows in the males and not the females, thus explaining this occurence. I suspect that this could be the case as the female Japan Blue guppies really looked identical to the Galaxy guppy female in terms of size, shape and colour. Simply amazing.

The finnage of the Jap Blues are average in my standards. One characteristic that needs to be improve is the size of the dorsal. Nevertheless, selective breeeding efforts did pay offa s can be seen in the picture below. I managed to improve the dorsal fin to a certain extent. Improving a few fishes finnage is one thing, getting the whole batch looking that way is another. That is why the challenges of Guppy breeding keeps me coming back to this hobby.

Let me conclude, I find that Jap Blues is a hardy line and breeds prolifically. They grow to a large size and is one of the easier strains to keep. It will make a good strain to start with as it is not as demanding as the other strains that might be a lil bit picky in terms of providing them the best kinda conditions.

Do give the strain a shot if you happen to come across any.

PS: I have found a Jap Blue line with blue body and pink tails. More about this guys. I am outcrossing them to another strain to see what happens. Stay tuned!!!

Ishykiel

In this post, I present to you pictures of Red Metal Lace guppies that have always been one of my favorite guppy strains and have always captured my imagination. When I first saw these guppies in real life, I was simply amazed by the sheer beauty of its colourful scales and beautiful well balanced shape. The picture above shows you how large the dorsals are and it is well proportioned to its caudal.

These fishes is Taiwanese in origin. They were imported by an airline pilot of mine and he got it from a Taiwanese breeder. I would have to commend the Taiwanese for breeding these beauties to near perfection. I was told that these fishes could grow to a large size too and sometimes the caudal would be so huge that older males might not be able to carry the tail altogether. That is an exception as most of the red laces have a sizable body to carry that load.

The 2nd picture above is one of my favorites. The fish is about to make a turn and it shows vividly the nice chain-linked patterns on the specimen’s body. The metal colour is also quite pronounced and is quite proportionate to the rest of the specimen’s body. The greenish body contrasts well too with the red fins. The metal head provides that touch of mystery to the fish and which remains as one of the characteristics of the fish that attracted me to keeping it.

These fishes breed true. I have acquired a few lines from various breeders at this moment. The lines orignate from various sources and are not closely related. I intend to line breed these fishes before outcrossing between lines to maintain the fish’s vigour and improve further the overall quality. These guppies remains as one of my favorite lines as the brilliance of the red coupled with the detailed patterns of the fish is often times, mesmerizing.

Sometimes, it makes me wonder, who the original person is who bred these fishes. Kudos to the fella for even dreaming of producing such amazing fishes. I think that the ancestors would definitely be a strain of Metal Guppies and the German Red Lace.

If you have any enquiries about these guppies, drop me an email at guppyblog [@] gmail [dot] com. I will be glad to help you in any way I can.

Cheers!!!

I have visited a number of Guppy setups done up by Guppy breeders in Singapore. I would say that I enjoyed visiting my fellow Guppy breeders to view their setup and of course to have a close up view of their wonderful guppies. We have some of the most dedicated Guppy breeders here in Singapore. Their fascination with Guppies is so overwhelming that sometimes they spend hours just going on and on about Guppy topics.

Guppy Club Singapore (GCS) has also played a crucial role in the development of Guppy keeping as a leisure activity in Singapore. Do visit the GCS site at www.sgguppy.com for more information.

My own Guppy setup is a simple one that consist of 24 tanks , supported on a 4 tier rod iron stand. This setup is customised and it did cost me a lot of dough to acquire this setup. The picture you see above is my very own guppy breeding setup.

As you can see, I use two pieces of 2 feet fluorascent lamps at each level of my setup. I believe that a Guppy room should be lighted at all times. I will usually leave a few lights on at night as Guppies will usually lay on the floor of their tank if it is pitch dark. This I believe will affect their tails in a negative way. As such, I recommend to all breeders out there to at least have a night light on in your guppy room at night. This will cause the Guppy to stay semi-awake and stay at the top or the middle of the tank.

I put plants in my tanks. This is for aesthetic as well as for biological purpose. The plants take in the carbon dioxide and other harmful elements in the water when exposed to light. It also allows the fishes to be comfortable in the tank and they will often be quite stable and not too jerky even if I suddenly on the lights in my room.

In each of my tanks, I use a corner filter that is filled with filter material and some smooth river stones to weigh the filter down. Aeration is provided by a Hi-Blow 80. A device that I think is a must if you were to have more than 40 tanks. Some of my tanks contain young 6cm Plecos that help to scrub clean the sides of the tank from algae and slime. They are perky fellas but do not just shift Plecos from one tank to another. I have found that this can sometimes upset the ecological balance of a tank and cause some Guppies to fall sick.

I don’t only keep adults in my 1.5ft by 1ft tanks. Fries do well too in a tank of this size too and I usually allow them to grow out in these tanks until time comes for them to be separated or to be pre-selected for various purposes.

As you can see, there are coral chips in the tank above. I use coral chips to stabilize the PH of my tank as it hovers between 6.5 and 6.8. some breeders feel that this is unnecessary. Like most things in life, this is up to your preference and your experience using the various methods and techniques available.

In the next post, I will introduce you to another guppy breeder Derrick. His system is much more complex than mine and it is automated. His Automated Guppy system allows a Guppy enthusiast to save a lot of time from doing manual water changes and is something worth looking at.

Till then.

~Ishykiel~