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Journal of an overrun guppy keeper; transitioning my tanks, establishing a strain?


BeeD
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Videos to come on the guppies. They don't hold still for photos. I have a couple phenotypes that I am isolating, but I'm not sure the underlying genetics will hold. This has all been pretty on-the-fly, and it's really my first effort at establishing a strain or even maintaining a strain. I've always been more of a toss 'em all in one tank kind of a guppy keeper, but if this one phenotype in particular holds, I will be very happy. Of all my tanks, I would say the Groot tank is the only one I really tried to "scape". Well... I'll explain as the journal goes on.

Also, this is not a top of the line phone and I am not a good cameraman. 

Shout out to my assistant. 

 

 

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Post one is about the Guppy Floats. I'll get around to full tank shots, hoping to talk my wife into taking a few half decent shots of the Groot tank. I like the way it looks, so, why share a crappy picture of it? 

So... Guppy Floats... I like guppy grass, and I've tried to use it so many different ways. I think a lot of you probably know how it always ends. Well, in an attempt to at least keep it all in a few concentrated spots, I decided to attach them to pot scrubbies. 

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I think it works best if you angle up and try to thread it through a single loop. Even then, if it's an especially tight scrubby, it can be hard to get the plant poked through so that it holds. 

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Almost immediately noticed a fry hanging out in the test scrubby. After adding more, I saw a female try to lay her fry on top of one, but the baby shot down to the gravel instead. 

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Beneficial bacteria built up quickly. Young snails are all over the scrubbies. The fry like to hang out in the guppy grass and pick away at the scrubbies. 

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This is how it's looking as of today. This is right before a top off, because I wanted to show just how cluttered this is going to be as usual. The guppy grass had all dropped runners within a few days, and by the end of a week it already pretty much looked like this. Most of the scrubbies are invisible from the front glass.

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I'm not sure what's going on with the crypts. They were just planted in this substrate a couple of weeks ago, so probably just normal crypt melt while they adapt, but not sure. The Bacopa Caroliniana is already climbing for the surface. I'm going to move some things around soon, but guppy grass will remain in the tank. I still love it, and this does kind of keep it from drifting all over the place, but as you can see this is yet another example of guppy grass being impossible to really harness without throwing it in a sump with the intent of letting it absolutely take over.

What is really cool is dropping flake/powerderized food near the filter bubbles and watching flow in little rivers between the guppy floats. The fry wait in there, safe and sound, and chomp away as the river of food goes by.

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I want to address the gravel too, since most newborn fry will probably be dropped there, but I think eventually the crypts and the bacopa will be thick enough for them. I want to see how these crypts do in here, and if they settle in with less melt I will add some crypt. parva to create more of a carpet. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Okay. So I have determined a couple of things. One... 5 guppy floats is too much. I think 4 is the max, but I may drop it all the way down to 1 as other plants fill in.

Also... I'm going to have to disrupt the crypts in the middle of their adjustment to their new conditions, because I did a pretty bad job planting the tank. Crypts and Bacopa need to be moved around a bit. 

Yea this is how long it takes me to "scape" a tank, lmao. Eventually I will add some décor, more rocks or wood....or both.

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  • 1 month later...

I've just decided against video for now. Caught myself spending too much time on it, and really leaned into the distractions pretty hard that day. But I still want to share with passersby here.

My favorite female guppy, favorite fish overall. Plus a Gen1 offspring male from one of the males in the next post. Anyway, proof that the wildest female guppy I've ever seen eats snails when I cut back their food for a day.

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Cool idea. I breed in the muck bucket with frogbit. It had to isolate a strain and applaud your efforts. I have a gold strain that is ok but I have lots of culls. The other strain I have the LFS does care about so much because most can’t tell. I do only breed the best I just don’t have cull. With the gold any spot on it makes it a cull. 

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On 6/29/2022 at 10:20 AM, Brandon p said:

Cool idea. I breed in the muck bucket with frogbit. It had to isolate a strain and applaud your efforts. I have a gold strain that is ok but I have lots of culls. The other strain I have the LFS does care about so much because most can’t tell. I do only breed the best I just don’t have cull. With the gold any spot on it makes it a cull. 

I think I have a very long way to go, especially with my fraternity/sorority cull tanks already filled. May not be able to do this, but it has been interesting.

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On 6/29/2022 at 11:46 AM, BrettD said:

I think I have a very long way to go, especially with my fraternity/sorority cull tanks already filled. May not be able to do this, but it has been interesting.

Most of the fun stuff is hard. I think you can do it. 

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  • 2 months later...

Well one question has been answered in my male cull tank. None of my tanks have ever been this heavily stocked, and I guess that must be why Guppy Grass has never survived with Pothos. I had one little piece with three leaves in there, and it has grown.9-2-22.jpg.dcbf4fcd28e9e02a921bd1508811a923.jpg

Along those same lines, I've had trouble with moss over the years. Best guess... This is Christmas moss from a ten gallon. I can't remember what I moved from that 10 to this tank, but I know it was like years ago... So this moss was sitting in the back of the tank, suppressed by the Pothos' heavy nutrient absorbtion, until I started adding so many guppies. Now it is a healthy healthy clump back there, creeping toward the sponge filter on that side. 

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So this last picture I could use some help with. Does that look like black mold to anyone else? I forgot to circle it, but it's kind of in the middle of the frame, growing up the leaf base... I keep the house down to 45% humidity, but if that's mold it still isn't good. I always assumed the snails would deal with it, but I'm not liking how this looks. The roots have always grown a fuzz, but I think it's plant not mold. That black stuff though... 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yea, so, guppy grass. I've been using strips and beakers, and I use various sources of water to make sure my test kits are working, and I read zeros for the full nitrogen cycle, even after pulling a pile of guppy grass. So I don't need a massive guppy grass bog, but it's what I get. I do a weekly weeding to keep at least 1/2 of the surface free for swimming and oxygen exchange, but twice a month now I have to do a major pull like this to keep at least 3/5ths of the water column freed up for the adults.

Obviously the fry think it's the perfect world before I start weeding.

I know most guppy grass people already know that it takes over everything, but I just can't stop laughing at this. Originally I intended to use those guppy floats as focal points and then do weekly trimmings to keep them tidy. Well, weekly isn't nearly enough. Maybe daily would have worked. 

 

 

 

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On 9/12/2022 at 1:59 PM, redfish said:

How are you doing on breeding the lines of guppies you want?  How many did you start with or have now?

I was trying to get a decent shot of them today. I started with 3 males and 7 females. The tank is a mess of fry right now, and I see a few 3rd Gen prospects. There is one really colorful 2nd Gen male giving me some encouragement, but because of the common genes in the line, his tale is not very uniform. There are two 2nd Gen males of the correct phenotype who are much smaller but with small roundish tails, and I am going to start a second tank with them. If that is the direction the line is headed, I would like to see if they will produce more of their type or if all of their male offspring will be a reversion to the common phenotype. 

Even if they're tiny, I would happily take a more common type tail as long as the rest of the phenotype holds. 

Edited by BrettD
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On 9/12/2022 at 7:19 PM, redfish said:

Nice. I have a couple males that I want to breed to a few females to see what patterns we can get. I’m thinking this will need a few extra tanks to keep the everything separate which becomes problematic. 

Ideally. For now I have all the 'desirables' in one tank. They'll stay together for a while until I get one or hopefully two males I think I can start a new tank with, and so on.

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  • 2 weeks later...

No pictures this time. If anyone has been following along, I can finally say that I have stretched my denitrification system past their limits with this guppy population. Kind of expected that, although the bio load in the desirables tank shouldn't have surpassed the plenum's capabilities...in theory. Mneh... 

So. Back to the good old tried and true method of using water changes to inhibit nitrates, at least until the population is reduced. 

Edited by BrettD
clarification
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Guppy float 2.0 will include emergent Christmas Moss. Definitely only one float per tank, otherwise the guppy grass gets all tangled together. This way I think even lazy people like me can actually manage it nicely. If anyone was actually curious how the other guppy floats went. Well.... See pic of yellow bag above, lol. But they will float even with a massive amount of plant attached to them, that much I can guarantee.

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  • 1 year later...

Happened to be around today, and just wanted to point out the weirdest tank I've ever had. 10g with 5g of water. Was brackish, converted back to fresh. It has around 30 guppies and 3 nerites. Deep sand that barely qualifies as deep, spider wood, lava rocks, zero nitrates...still.  I've shown it before, here's where it's at now. I used the flash just to show the guppies, it's usually a low light tank. They're all getting moved slowly over the next couple of weeks, except for the snails. But this thing is quite the accident.

 

 

 

 

 

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Just want to add... These are the shiniest, healthiest looking guppies I have, even after converting back to fresh over the last several months. I really just don't get it, and I test constantly. They're all descendants of three females I added a few years ago to see if they liked brackish water better than they liked the main tanks. The fish in the other tanks are generally healthy, but they're so busy breeding I think they never really slow down.

These fish will still drop fry, but... Well maybe that's it. Maybe they're all eating fry. A few fry make it, but not a lot.

It's weird. I would've guessed these were the most troubled fish in my whole fishroom, but it's the other tanks I have to stay on top of. These will eat anything, while one of my other tanks has decided they hate most flakes and only want CoOp fry food, Hikari freeze-dried daphnia, bbs (frozen or live), and absolutely will not eat freeze-dried adult brine shrimp. This tank? Easy. Drop it in, they eat it.

The debris on the upper part of the glass is mulm that the snails drag around on their shells. The guppies like to throw the mulm around looking for bits of food. I used to attack mulm relentlessly, now I just let this stuff sit. 

Edited by Beed
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