Guppy Fish Contests

Competition Tips 

I do not teach you anything by telling you that it is easy to reproduce guppies.

The difficulty arises in the form of long rigorous selection work for the improvement of guppies strain in order to participate and maybe win prizes in contests.

There are 10 golden rules to follow to improve a strain able to place you among the best French breeders, European world view.

Snow Blue Guppy

Choosing the F0: Start with a good strain of guppies from a breeder you will judge the quality as excellent. Some couples from pet stores are, for the most part, not true matched couples. Males and females were then really no kinship between them, setting the qualities of their future offspring may be difficult. I advise you to buy your guppies by correspondence, at fairs, at exhibitions or sleeves of French championships organized by associations such as the EGS or AFV, this will allow you to leave on good foundations.

• Buy young guppies: The old couples often have problems when playing. They sometimes have difficulty swimming with their large fins and one can see that there is also more defects in the fry from the coupling of an old couple.

• Select future breeders: Play your guppies and choose one or two fish you will use for the next generation. The improvements of the line will not happen suddenly, but come from many small improvements. So you need to have a plan, and keep it throughout the development of the strain.

• Avoid overcrowding: Being too populate an aquarium slows the growth of guppies. A dozen guppies in a 50 liter tank is enough. The best way to get to get a group of guppy with a high potential is to select the best. Why try to raise 20 poor fish when you can get 10 excellent qualities. If you give guppies instead, they can reach their maximum theoretical sizes. Set yourself ahead of your goals and follow your program to the letter. If you work on the form, use the guppies that have the best shape, do not change suddenly to use the most colorful guppies and if still you still want to use, start a second tray or you work on color separately.

• Practice Hardcore selection: Select only your best males and females. Do not use the first males who have reached in your adulthood, these males rarely get the size of those that will take longer to mature. Use the best females, I mean the female that best intersect compared to males, and not necessarily the prettiest. Choosing the best male remains fairly easy, but choosing the best female requires a good knowledge of your stock. It is then not difficult to know what will bring the best female fry. For this accouplez each of your selected females to one male good. Elevating the different ranges separately, you will be able to compare the fry mature. Following this comparison, then use females (two or three maximum, depending on your available space) that produced the finest generations.

• Monitor inbreeding: I advise you to go on at least two different lines to cross from time to time, if you could lose your strain because of consanguinity (inbreeding is defined as the result of a breeding Sexual between two related individuals). The first signs of inbreeding are lower fertility or a large percentage of fry malformations such as malformed fins or hernias.

• Use High Protein Diet: If you want your guppies grow as fast as possible, feed three to four times a day during their growth period, ie during the first months of life. Give fry freshly hatched brine shrimp nauplii and possibly micro-worms. Then feed the juveniles carefully with food premium qualities of the frozen and live food.

• Change water daily: Do a partial water change once a day. Uneaten food and waste produced by the fish quickly pollute the water.

• Use the right temperature: Even if your guppies can withstand a temperature between 18 and 30 ° C, the optimum is between 24 and 26 ° C. If you have batteries and you heat your fish room completely, put the fry in the upper rows where the air is much warmer. The lower rows will be cooler and this is where you can keep adults, their metabolism will slow down because of the temperature and you will have an easier to observe.

• Be patient: Only 5 to 10% of the fry will have the potential to be better than their parents, but it's more than enough to improve your reach.