How to Raise Fancy Guppy Fry and Care for Pregnant Females

Fancy Guppy Babies or Fry are very easy to raise. Pregnant females have their babies on a schedule, once every 30 days. After you have figured out their schedule, you can begin collecting their babies easily. If you have figured out your female will have her babies on the 27th, you can keep her in a heavily planted tank or breeding trap 2-3 days prior to her having the babies.

It is important not to stress the mother so care should be taken when changing her conditions. It is recommended not to move her into different water conditions and to keep things as comfortable as possible to keep from causing disease. A simple solution is to add a breeding net into the tank, put her in fill the net 1/3 - 1/2 full of aquarium plants (either live or plastic).

During birth, she may sit in the plants. When she is done giving birth she will either seek to eat her young, or if it was a stressful birth, find a place to rest. She might ignore her young entirely and you're in luck, she will just be swimming freely in the open space you provided. If she is not having any more babies (you can watch her for 10-15 minutes, she should not release any young), just remove her from the net and put her into the tank.

After a few days you can move the young into a temperature controlled environment with the same water from the original tank, 2.5 - 5 gallons should be fine.

• Feed them regularly 2 -3 times a day.
• Keep the bottom clean of un-eaten food
• Keep the water quality clean, this may require small semi-frequent water changes. If you're not feeding too much and the water quality is good, no need to make changes, you want their environment to be as stress free as possible.

Your young should grow quickly and within a few weeks be too large for any adult guppies to eat. At this point it might be a good idea to get them into a larger tank. In our facilities, we introduce small white cloud minnow adults into the tank with them to eat any excess food. Excess food and poor water quality is the number one cause of fish disease. You want to keep your tank water as clean and stable as possible. No PH fluctuations or temperature changes.

Depending on what you plan to do with the fry, you may want to start seperating the males from the females. This will allow you to proceed with selective breeding and create or improve upon your own strains of guppies. Otherwise, you might just keep them all together or sell them to your local fish store or online.

Posted: January 23rd, 2015