Guppies

I bought a large fish tank at a yard sale... I bought a couple of guppys... Now I have MANY guppys...lol they breed like gophers.... Anyway I put several guppys in each cattle tank each spring and they kill the mosquito and larva... They dont overwinter but I have a few extra lol.. Each spring.

Sounds weird, but I find the female guppies more beautiful than the males. The males are just ridiculous with all the colours, especially some fancy varieties... females look more like wild fish, and they also have more interests than just reproduction ;)
Here is a picture of my first guppies - the darker female had babies three days ago, but not by this male; she was pregnant already when I bought her. The lighter one is smaller and didn't have babies but she's probably pregnant too. I'm planning to use them outside in small "aquaponics" in the summer.

13 days old guppy. I'm surprised that it survived all my newbie experiments! Actually, looks like all the babies survived. They are really hardy. In the summer some of them will be outdoors to hunt for mosquitos. I love to watch them hunting, they're really determined!. Some will stay in the aquarium and I will probably sell some pretty males.

Ooooh..... I'd recently given up on my pond fantasy because of fear of mosquitoes, but now this is a great idea and it will propel me back into pond daydreams...

Rebecca Norman wrote:Ooooh..... I'd recently given up on my pond fantasy because of fear of mosquitoes, but now this is a great idea and it will propel me back into pond daydreams...

Where there are fish, there are no mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes breed in small waterbodies where there are no fish, and amphibians cannot get into it (like old buckets lying somewhere).

See this video for more information : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOeTdUqAOWY

Rebecca, you should definitely try! Are you in the Himalayas now? That would be fun... I guess guppies are everywhere. Some friends even found them in ponds and rivers around here, as if they survived the winter (that was last year).
I'll probably keep the females in the garden first, because they're less colourful so they won't get eaten by birds so easily... although I don't mind if some wild birds snack on them every now and then. Also, females are bigger and stronger. When I crush a water snail for them to eat, a female usually takes the biggest chunk and flaps it around, like dogs when they catch something or play with a toy. Then smaller fish can eat the tiny pieces that fall out.
They also try to catch small flies and springtails that walk on the water.

R. Han, so cool that Geoff also caught a shrimp in the pond! I keep some shrimps with the guppies and they're great filterers. There is a lot of colour varieties (just like in guppies) but my favourite is the yellow, that has a stripe down the back (Neocaridina davidi).

Flora Eerschay wrote:I guess guppies are everywhere. Some friends even found them in ponds and rivers around here, as if they survived the winter (that was last year).

Guppies should not survive in Poland outside of the warm wastewater of some powerplant,
gambusia affinis can survive even some ice on the surface, so maybe it was gambusia affinis?
The later was used for mosqito control, but is now considered an invasive species,
as it is very agressive, hungry and reproduces a lot.

Flora Eerschay wrote:
There is a lot of colour varieties (just like in guppies) but my favourite is the yellow, that has a stripe down the back (Neocaridina davidi).

Yeah N. Davidi has a lot of colour variation, see attached picture that shows which color evovled from which.

There is some species of native guppy in the Rio Magante, although I have yet to identify it exactly. The dominant male of each group has orange fins, but otherwise, they are not colorful. I have been thinking that I would like to try them in an aquarium, and since they are native, they should be well adapted to conditions.

R. Han, you may be right, I haven't seen these fish and they don't have photos of them.

Thanks for the picture, maybe we should start a topic about shrimps! I did a water test just now, and the aquarium with shrimps did better than the one without, although it doesn't use a filter (only aerator, for a few minutes once or twice a day).

In the past when I lived in Las Vegas I had a pond in my yard that I stocked with guppies and a few other breeds.  They handled the cold winter pretty well, I just covered it at night with plastic to hold in the heat.

I now have a 100 gallon stock tank in the yard full of guppies.  I built a wood box around the tank and insulated it to help keep it cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  I use an appropriate sized aquarium heater in the winter and cover it with plastic at night to hold in the heat.  I also built a small green house around the tank to protect some plants during the cold winter and to limit sun exposure on others in the summer.  The end of last summer I had about 300 guppies living well and reproducing rapidly.  I got amazing color varieties and they more they crossbred the more beautiful variety of colors appeared.  I weed out the plain, the deformed, and the over abundant varieties and feed them to the chickens and ducks.  The birds love chasing the live treats in a shallow dish, the fish probably are not amused but that was my purpose for raising guppies.  This year I plan to sort out groups of 5 guppies and sell them at the farmers market for $10.  As mentioned they do well in water tanks and small yard ponds and keep the bugs at a minimum.  They are in a better temperature controlled environment but they have easily survived water temps between 50*f and 90*f with minimal losses.

I have fish with iridescent blue stripes on the back, black with red tails, black with yellow tails, natural blonde with red tails with blue spots, brown with a yellow back, and white with a blue tail, amongst many other beauties.  All that from my original 7 females and 3 males.  A couple months ago I added in 3 new females to add to the color variety, a white, a blonde, and a sunburst red, and I also added in a yellow male and a bright orange male.  I am looking forward to the future color varieties.

Meet Cortana, Pablo's new girlfriend. Pablo is a "wild" Endler guppy (nothing wild about him, but his colours are rather typical) and Cortana is a fancy variety called ginga rubra. I'm not going to breed fancy guppies, but I wanted something unrelated. And I found a nice hobby breeder nearby, so she's not from a pet shop.
Fun fact: when I was driving through a random village to get her, I saw some containers parked on a railway siding, and some were labelled like the cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal. Were these containers from that ship? I don't know!

Rebecca Norman wrote:Ooooh..... I'd recently given up on my pond fantasy because of fear of mosquitoes, but now this is a great idea and it will propel me back into pond daydreams...

Here, so far, tree frogs seem to keep mosquitos in my water catching buckets etc under control.  After a bit they tend to swarm with tadpoles. Now the swamp in one corner of my property is a whole nuther thing.  I plan to put some sort of small fish in any pond I dig though.  More mosquito larva eaters is better!

I have Blue Gills (Lepomis macrochirus) in my little outdoor pond, they are native to my area. They are viscous predators  but lose interest in very small prey as they they grow large. Japanese Rice Fish (Oryzias latipes) stay small and are quite hardy, easily living all winter under the ice. White Cloud Mountain Minnows (Tanichthys albonubes) also stay very small and easily adapt to the cold.

Another fabulous fish easily adapted to cold is the Paradise Fish, sometimes called Paradise Gurami. (Macropodus opercularis) When it comes to predation and flat out bad attitude they they are even more so than the Bluegills.  

I still love my guppies though and suspect, given how easy they are to breed that they too could be adapted to outdoor living in winter. I would give it a try except I'm sure the Bluegills would eat them.

Wait till you see Cortana's ex, Zoroaster... he now lives with a bunch of young guppies who are very impressed by him, because they don't have any coloration yet.

but lose interest in very small prey as they they grow large.

That could be the advantage of guppies breeding like crazy, I guess; there will be usually a group of all sizes, from tiny fry that will eat the smallest bugs, to the largest females that can gobble up a whole (crushed) snail.

The fry will be one month old in two days!
Two males are gaining colours already. It's funny that the colour looks as if it's displayed on them, like a hologram.
But we're all living in a hologram, aren't we?

Guppies cleaning aphids off my Pak Choi seedlings! They are really useful little fish. And they love aphids even more than daphnia. I may grow salads just for that ;D