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Michaels Fish Rooms Top 5 Guppy Breeding Tips

• Sep 16, 2019
• Web Aggrigator
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This is not IFGA rules of breeding guppy's. This is just five tips that have worked well for Michaels Fish Room incase you want to breed them and sell them to your local fish store (LFS), or you want to have a family project that allows you to breed fish.

5 - Good Food

Good food is one of the most important things when it comes to your fish. Food is important when keeping fish not even just for breeding. Thins you want to look for is a higher protein food, and you want that protein to come from real fish stuff, not low-quality protein. Michale's Fish Room suggests over 40% protein, possibly even closer to 50%. At least a couple of times a week. How Guppies are omnivores that means that they eat plants and meat. Variety is important. You want to make sure your Guppies are getting a good range of protein but also a good variety of plant/vegies.

The Northfin Community food is one of my favorites which is a mix of the Chicluits, Kelp, and the Curl Flake. I also like some of the Cobalt foods, especially the Worm Medley especially. I also like feeding frozen blood warms, Bryan Shrimp and cyclops to Guppy fry.

If you can afford the frozen food feed it a couple of times a week and then feed the flake food a couple of times a week. You can even rotate some high-quality pellet foods like the Cobalt Ultra Guppy.

4 - Clean Water

There is a difference between moan free water vs. dirty water. Moan is OK dirty is not OK. There is a difference. Adult Guppies will produce hormones that will affect breeding. It's suggested to do daily water changes when you are looking to breed. You want to do 10-20% water changes. My water changes are automated an occur while I am sleeping, but if you have one or two tanks, manual water changes should not be a big problem. For the most part, the average tank size used to breed guppies is a 20 gallon high tanks.

When doing your water changes, condition your water if needed, make sure the water temperature is close to the tank temperature. The temperatures do not have to be the same, just near one another.

3 - Provide Cover 

You want to make sure that the tank has lots of areas where the fry can hide. You can use breeding boxes. You can remove the pregnant momma place her in a tank and then 28 days later she will give birth. My style is to provide lots of cover to allow the fry a place to escape. I like to have java moss in all of my tanks. The momma will drop her fry in the Java Moss, and the fry will hang out in the Java Moss. Hopefully, they are dropped at night, but some will get eaten, and that is natural and fits my schedule more than the other methods. They will eat the microorganisms around Java Moss until they get a little bigger and smarter. Once they do not fit into the adult guppies mouth easily, then they will start to swim around more.

If you can not get Java Moss locally, then you should be able to order it online. My Java Moss does well when I leave it alone and overfeed my fish and continue my regular maintenance. If you can get Guppy grass it is a better option then Java Moss, unfortunately, Guppy Grass does not do well in my tanks.

2 - Good Filtration

While you are in the breeding stage, you will want to feed the momma a high protein diet and will most likely be overfeeding the tank. While overfeeding a tank, you will need the beneficial bacteria to transform the ammonia into nitrite and then into nitrate. The beneficial bacteria will grow on the surface area of your filtration bio media. Using oversized sponges is beneficial plus the plants are extra surface area where the bacteria can grow as well, and the plants will absorb the Nitrate helping cleaning your water as well. The sponge filters will also build a bio-film that the guppies will pick on as well. If you want to add a hangover the back filter or a canister make sure to put on an intake filter sponge to prevent the Guppy fry from getting sucked up into them which can cause you to lose all of your babies. When using sponge filters, try to use double the output of the sponge filter. So if you have a 10-gallon tank, use a sponge filter rated for 20 gallons. Keep in mind that the beneficial bacteria can only grow depending on its food source. So if you are not feeding enough then even though you may have a big filter, you may not have as much beneficial bacteria in the tank. As you ramp up your feeding more beneficial bacteria will grow depending on the amount of source area available for it to grow. It best to ramp up your feeding vs. quickly changing to a heavy feeding cycle how you may not have enough beneficial bacteria to support it.

1 - Get Good Healthy Guppies

When you start the breeding process, you always want to get good healthy Guppies to start. Try to find a local breeder if possible or a local fish store (LFS) that quarantines their fish and tends to keep healthy fish. Never buy sick fish if you plan to breed them; it will just be an uphill battle.

Michael looks for the nicest looking females how with his experience they tend to produce the nices looking males. There is no scientific data proving that this works, but it has been my experience. Here are some things that I look for:

• I only buy fat fish, you don't want to buy skinny fish. Skinny fish usually have a problem, or they are malnourished. 
  
  
• They should have bright eyes and not look hazy looking. 
  
  
• They are swimming normally, and they are reactive to their environment.
  
  
• They are fat, yes that was mentioned before, but it's important and worth mentioning again.

Other things to consider when choosing your guppy is the colors that you want, what types of fins do you want, and the size. The traits you are looking for should be seen in the fish that you choose to breed.

Always choose the nices female in the group.