Thursday, July 28, 2011

Guppies!

This is a wild guppy. You know, the original guppy, before all the inbreeding causing wacky colors and tails that are too long. This was the species of fish I started my aquarium hobby with when I was about seven or eight. Today they're not too hard to find if you know where to look. They're often kept in poor conditions and sold for maybe 10-15 cents a piece as feeder fish and if you're willing to nurse them back to health (probably loosing a few on the way) then they are a fascinating and easy to keep fish. I bought 20 of these little guys a few days ago for 3 dollars and I have maybe half that now. I have 5 adult fish and one fish had about 5-7 fry. all of the female adults are pregnant though so I'll easily come out of this with more guppies than I purchased. The most likely disease a guppy will get is fin rot, a fungal disease. this is easily cured with medicine and can be avoided by adding a little salt (uniodized!) to the aquarium.  As a bonus the salt will also make your guppies fins grow. You may be asking, why get the feeder fish when the fancy ones are so much prettier? I'll tell you why, the ones that are prettier are not only more expensive, they are delicate as hell and don't breed well (the wild ones breed constantly and produce large amount of fry where the fancy ones have trouble breeding and only produce 1-2 fry). I hope you think about getting some because I love them!

Aquariums Rock!

No comments:

Post a Comment