Breeding Guppies – How to Breed Guppies?

If you want to maintain your aquarium stocked with these adorable guppy fish, you’ll need to learn how to breed them and care for their offspring.

Any fish, even the guppy, has its own set of changes and obstacles when it comes to breeding. Bending spines and having too many fries are two of the most common issues while raising guppies. Both the moms and the fry acquire significantly twisted and curled spines as a result of improper water factors. Furthermore, once they begin reproducing, it is generally hard to stop them. Furthermore, once they begin reproducing, it is generally hard to stop them. A female can still give birth every month despite being isolated from a man for more than 6 months.

We’ll show you how to breed guppies and nurture fry in the appropriate manner in this post. so that you may expand the number of guppy inhabitants in your tank.

This material will be broken into sections for your convenience.

1. Guppies in the Making

Choose the fish you’d want to Breed

Keep in mind the quantity of fish you wish to breed, as well as the color and form of each fish’s tail. If you breed two fish with the same color pattern, the fry will have the same color pattern as well. Fin form follows the same approach.

Number of Fish

For breeding purposes, you should choose one male and two or three female guppies. When the male-to-female ratio is one to one, the male gets violent and chases the female about the tank. The male’s attention is distributed between three females in a one-to-three ratio, making reproduction a less stressful procedure for the females.

Color Pattern

Guppy motifs come in a variety of colors. Wild (Grey or olive coloring), Albino (light colors or white with red eyes), Blonde (light colors with black pigment,) and Blue (light colors with blue pigment) are among them (shimmering blue color.)

Guppy Tails can be Shaped in a Number of Ways

From a rounded back fin to a sword-like shape. Guppy tails come in a range of shapes and sizes, but the Delta (a massive triangle shape), Fantail (a fan-shaped tail), and Round tail are the most common (which is a small, round shape.)

2. How to Make a Breeding Tank for Guppies?

There are several things to consider while setting up your breeding tank, the most important of which is “What do I plan on doing with the fry?”

If you plan on keeping the fry in the same tank as the parents rather than separating them as soon as they are born or using a breeder basket, the setup will be rather different. In any case, there will be some parallels.

Make a Decision on a Breeding Tank

It’s best to use a 10 to 20-gallon tank with a heater and a soft filter. Because the fry (newborn guppies) may be sucked up and killed by the filter, you want it to be gentle. If you think your filter is too powerful, cover the aperture with transparent tights. Not only will the tights filter the water, but they will also keep the fry safe.

Put the Tank Together

Because guppy parents can turn cannibalistic, you’ll need to provide hiding places for the fry once they’ve been hatched. Cover guppy fry with low-floating plants since they prefer to sink. Because healthy fry will swim upwards, some high cover is also required. You don’t need to use a substrate. A substrate is a term for the rocks or fake rocks used to cover the bottoms of fish tanks. A bare bottom tank is perfect for frying since it’s simple to clean and lets you keep track of how many fries are alive and how much they eat. Guppy fry can hide in spawning moss, also known as Java moss.

Decorations & Substrate

Guppies may be kept on gravel, sand, bare bottom, or tile. Because guppies may pick at the substrate for pieces of uneaten food, avoid using extremely fine gravel and remove all tiny rocks that come with regular gravel. We also propose putting up a few huge decorations where ladies may hide and flee.

At least 3-4 sight break decorations (decorations that disrupt the line of sight between two fish) are required. Females must be able to get out of the males’ sight since they are continually pursued and harassed (often to death). Apart from that, it’s totally up to you to decorate.

If you want to find the fry and move them to another tank, you’ll need to set up fry traps, which we’ll go over in more detail later. If you don’t, you should intensively plant the tank with java moss, Süsswassertang, and guppy grass, as well as many regions of tight-knit plants. The parents will begin hunting the fry as soon as they are born, but the fry has the ability to flee into the moss, where the adults will be unable to find them.

Parameters for water

Guppies bring with them a slew of problems, including water quality. Because they are advertised as novice fish, many newbies wind up getting them without learning how to properly care for them.

While a novice should be able to test for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate, it’s doubtful that they’ll be able to test for kH, gH, TDS, and salinity, which are all important in keeping guppies.

Guppies require hard water that has a high level of calcium in order to survive. Females must be able to remove large amounts of calcium from the water since they can give birth to up to 30 fries every month.

Their skeletons, as well as the bones of the fry, will grow weak and deformed if calcium is not added to the water, either by broken coral or another source.

TDS, or total dissolved solids, is a measurement of the number of minerals and other things dissolved in water, such as salt.

However, because it counts them all as a single number, you can’t tell what makes up the dissolved solids. The general hardness, or gH, is similar to TDS in that it solely measures calcium and magnesium in water.

You may use the carbonate hardness kit to figure out how much calcium is in the water. This is crucial for keeping guppies alive, and you’ll almost certainly need to add a carbon supplement to the water. To encourage healthy breeding, acquire food with a better nutritional content before placing the guppies in the breeding tank.

3. What does High-Quality Mean and How Much Does it Cost?

Buying a pair of $60 or $100 fish when you first start looking into breeding any fish, especially guppies, may be appealing.

Because they may produce up to 30 offspring each month and sell for $20-200 apiece, breeding them for even a month looks like a good way to make money. Unfortunately, breeding guppies isn’t particularly lucrative.

Because of its scarcity, individuals may demand exorbitant prices for a single fish. Breeding them is more difficult than breeding other guppies since they are generally sensitive strains with high fry death rates.

The sensitives vary by strain, for example, albinos are often weak but also have vision difficulties, something you wouldn’t notice in a green delta guppy or a pet store mutt.

It’s preferable to start with a stronger strain to acquire a feel for it, then work your way up in complexity.

Due to inbreeding, sensitive strains are fragile. Selective breeding frequently necessitates inbreeding, and we wouldn’t have as many color varieties as we have today if it didn’t. The blood, on the other hand, becomes weaker as the strain or coloring becomes stronger.

All creatures have genetic distinctions, including strengths and disadvantages. It’s critical to inject new blood into a strain because if you don’t, you’ll end up dealing exclusively with flaws.

Closely related animals are more prone to inherit undesirable recessive characteristics, some of which are fatal. Because the offspring would require one of the unusual features from the father and one from the mother, these qualities are seldom seen. When animals are inbred, the chance of these harmful recessive characteristics showing in the progeny increases.

As a result, while they may appear to be a great investment, they often have very low survival rates. Starting with a high-quality strain is a bad idea unless you have a lot of expertise in producing guppies.

Obtaining Breeders

You’re ready to choose your breeders once you’ve set up and cycled your tank (when 4ppm ammonia is converted to nitrate in less than 24 hours).

Ratios of Males to Females

You should never choose one male and one female when breeding guppies. The female will be harassed to death by the lone guy.

You’ll need a specified amount of males and females when selecting your fish. Males have a gonopodium, which is a long, thin structure that sits where a fish’s anal fin would ordinarily be. Males have a brighter and more vibrant color as well as a brighter body coloration than females.

Females have a triangular anal fin, are colorless on the body, and have lighter in color. It is normally relatively simple to distinguish between the sexes. In a ten-gallon tank, start with one male and two to three females. You have total control over the kind and strain you select, but you must first verify that your strain has a market. Because they’re already so popular, you won’t be able to sell a single strain or combination.

Keep a Close Eye out for Signals that your Guppy is about to Become a Mother

In most cases, the gestation period lasts between 26 and 31 days. Your guppy’s stomach will be large when she’s ready to give birth if she’s blonde or albino, and her gravid spot will be black or dark maroon. and that its stomach will be square rather than spherical at the time of delivery. Also, keep in mind that guppy fish do not lay eggs; instead, they produce live offspring. Also, be very careful after birth since if the fish is left in the tank for too long, it may swallow its children.

4. Taking Care of Fries

Maintain a Healthy Temperature in the Tank by Keeping it Clean

Fry has to be kept in a tank with a temperature of roughly 78 degrees Fahrenheit (25.5 degrees C.) Maintain this temperature in your tank until the rise has increased. Cleaning the tank will be necessary on a regular basis. To maintain the water clean, siphon the tank gently whenever it becomes too filthy and do 40 percent water changes every few days.

Give the fry the Correct Kind of Food

Brine shrimp, micro-worms, or powdered flakes are eaten by guppy fry. You should feed them twice a day. Guppies consume meat as well as veggies. Vegetable flakes, as well as regular flakes, should be fed to your guppies. Remember that fry is small, and putting too much food in the tank might make them sick or even kill them if the food turns bad while sitting in the water.

Guppies should be fed newly hatched brine shrimp while they are young to maximize their development potential. Place a tiny bit of boiled spinach in your guppies’ aquarium if you wish to treat them.

Take Precautions to keep your fry Healthy

This entails eliminating any deceased fry. Dead fry will float to the surface of the tank, making it simple to remove them. Count how many friendlies you have. If you see a large number of fry deaths, you’ll want to discover what’s killing them. Switch to a new type of food and change the water. Guppy’s health is harmed by accumulating trash.

When the fry are Large Enough, Transfer them to a Regular Tank

When the fry has grown to a healthy size, which takes about a month and a half to two months, they will be ready to leave the breeding tank. You may place them in a regular aquarium with non-aggressive fish, sell them to a pet store, or give them as gifts to friends.

The Bottom Line on Breeding Guppies

Guppies breeding may be a fun and rewarding process. Guppies were among the first fish I successfully reared and kept from fry.

Guppies are an excellent choice for newcomers to fish breeding because of their hardiness. This guide should provide you with all of the information you need to get started for breeding your guppies.