Re: About 165 Guppies to the LFS

[tr...@prismnet.com]

I don't know if this is going to thread properly. Apparently, Google
Groups won't let me "Reply" in a thread after it's a month or two
old. Grrr.

Also, I hope folks don't mind me chronicling the fish I take to the
local pet store in this thread. It makes a kind of useful record for
me.

I'm running a little behind. Back on June 4th, I took another 254
guppies to the LFS. Amazonia again, this time.

I also took thirty-one sword tails, 16 green, 11 red and 4
pineapple. That left about thirty adult swordtails in the tank and
who knows how many adolescents, plus all the remaining female guppies.

As I mentioned in an earlier message, I emailed with Caroline at
Amazonia, and according to her all the guppies I took them back in
April did fine. They passed a number of them on to schools for
classrooms. Apparently, they do a lot of donating to local schools.

On the one hand, that's a relief that my guppies lived the way I would
expect them to at Amazonia. It leaves me wondering what's up at
Aquatek that they can't keep guppies alive for very long. Perhaps it
is that parasite that Caroline says she read about. Aquatek seems to
be a good store. The tanks are clean and the fish look healthy,
except for the danged guppies and often the swordtails.

Anyway, it is well worth the extra drive over to Amazonia.

I emailed Caroline about ten days ahead of time and told her there'd
be 40 - 60 male guppies and a similar number of females. It turned
out that I had 118 males ready to go, and I sent 136 females along
with them. 102 of the males were the variety with a deep blue body
and red/orange tail. Variations in the amount of blue/black spots in
the tail. The other 16 males were various color varieties that show
up in my stock. Mainly the snake skin variegated patterns.

They didn't seem to mind that I brought them 2 - 3 times the number I
estimated, but boy am I bad at estimating how many male guppies are in
a tank.

I kept sixteen really nice looking males for breeding, nineteen males
that were too young to go, and two old guys.

I also took about thirty cherry shrimp to them. I have some questions
about culling cherry shrimp, but I think I'll start a separate thread
for that...

I only got $50 in fish credit and an algae scraper. Caroline kept
asking me if I needed any other equipment or stuff, so I guess I could
have gotten a tub of food or something, but I really don't need more
stuff.

I moved about twenty-five young males out of the baby tank to the male
guppy tank.

I have about four or five different color varieties I'd like to breed,
but I don't know how I could manage that many babies. But if I
stretch the time out between each variety, the interesting parents
might die of old age.

There's this variation on the deep blue body/orange tail, where the
tail seems to have a black overlay.

Then there are light colored snake skin guppies.

Dark colored snake skin guppies.

Orange tailed guppies with an orange pattern on their body instead of
the deep blue. These look like what are called "painted" some times.

And then there are these "blond" guppies which seem to have a yellow
body instead of the normal gray or silver, and orange or yellow tails.

Oh, and there are some with deeply black pectoral fins. That's kind
of interesting.

And there's this one female with a huge black delta tail. I really
ought to breed her with someone -- I guess either the black-overlay
red/blues and/or the black pectoral finned males.

Decisions, decisions....


Jeff Walther

[NetMax]

LOL, sounds like you need more tanks for your line breeding.

NetMax

[tr...@prismnet.com]

On Jul 19, 4:18 pm, NetMax <computeral...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> LOL, sounds like you need more tanks for your line breeding.
>
> NetMax

Yes. However, I'm pretty much at my limits for doing tank
maintenance. Even if I could make space for another tank or tanks,
I'm already spending as much or more time on aquarium maintenance as I
want to.

Every so often I try to tell myself that more tanks would mean less
frequent maintenance as filter cleaning and water changing on the dot
every two weeks would no longer be as critical, but I don't think it
would work that way.

I may set up the 90 gallon one of these days. It's already taking up
the space. It's just empty. But it's at floor level with a shelf
above it and with various other factors, maintenance is going to be
really awkward if I set that one up. It would be a great way to
uncrowd the swordtails and female guppies though.

Maybe a canister is the way to go instead of HOB, so that it's easier
to access the filter for cleaning. But the instructions for the
Marineland C series, which I have on hand, say to have the canister
some number of feet below the water line, which would not be met with
a floor level tank. I wonder how important that requirement really
is...


Jeff Walther

[NetMax]

I don't think it is critical. It's related to start-up. Probably for
siphoning purposes, because they want a length of intake pipe long
enough to hold more weight in water, than resistance through the
filter system. Gets the siphon started faster (more easily), but
after there is water in the return pipe, the system is closed, so the
location of the filter only affects the internal pressure on the seals
(if you were to put a running canister filter on hose extensions far
below the tank, it might burst its seals apart and explode, or far
above, it would suck air past its seals, wanting to implode). Once
running, the ideal location is slightly below the lowest water level
you would normally expect to occur.

Your problem is not the # of tanks, but the amount of maintenance per
tank. For this I would investigate methods to make the tanks more
maintenance-free. This is one of my fields of great interest : )

NetMax

[tr...@prismnet.com]

On Jul 20, 3:35 pm, NetMax <computeral...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Your problem is not the # of tanks, but the amount of maintenance per
> tank.  For this I would investigate methods to make the tanks more
> maintenance-free.  This is one of my fields of great interest : )

Mathematically, I would say that the problem is the product of number
of tanks and amount of maintenance per tank. :-)

The real problem may just be the house, the cat, the son, the job, the
other hobbies, the internet.... Realistically, tank maintenance is
about three hours every two weeks, if I'm not catching and sorting or
moving guppies. But three hours out of the weekend is substantial
these days.

I have some tanks with gravel and some bare tanks with sponge
filters. All of the tanks have HOB filters, either penguin biowheel
or Aquaclear or both.

I thought that bare tanks would be lower maintenance that graveled
tanks, because no gravel vacuuming. But by the time I shut off the
filters to let stuff in the water settle (the sponges never get it
all) siphon off the bottom, check the bucket for any renegade fish,
siphon off a clean bucket, remove, squeeze and rinse the sponges and
put it all back, the bare tanks really aren't any less maintenance
than the tanks where I'm vacuuming gravel.

Now, vacuuming gravel could be lower maintenance if I could connect
the vacuum siphon to my garden hose siphon, which I can, just by
inserting the vacuum hose into the end of the garden hose. But it is
not a gas tight seal, so if I do that it draws air and I need to keep
the joint under water, which is a pain while also trying to vacuum
around the plants.

If I just vacuum into a bucket, then I end up carrying a couple of
buckets per tank, and it really slows things down. But the potted
plants seem to like it.

I think what I need to do is build an adapter which connects tightly
with the vacuum at one end and screws onto the garden hose at the
other. I bet there are PVC fittings that will get me to that point.
Hmmmm. The only problem with this scheme is that some of the fish
are stupid enough or curious enough to occasionally get caught in the
vacuum. Especially the female guppies. With buckets, this isn't a
problem. With a garden hose out into the back yard, it is a problem.

I guess I could have the garden hose exhaust into an upright bucket
with a screen over the top. That way, as it overflows, any fish will
still be trapped in a bucket of water. The problem with this is then
I lose a bucket's height worth of siphon height and that slows things
down.

It would be nice if maintenance were simply dragging the garden hose
to each tank as a siphon and then dragging it to each tank for
refill.

Or just turning a knob -- but I don't have the space/infrastructure to
plumb every tank for that kind of thing.

Now I feel like I'm whining. I guess what I really want is more
fish, without the work that goes with them. :-)

Jeff Walther

[NetMax]

Lessons from the LFS: Shake the gravel vac to scare the fish away, cut
notches in the bottom of the vacuum to more quickly penetrate into the
gravel. Use automatic water change system which tops up tanks 4 times
a day, or does a 5% change.

Lessons from home: Install a mixing valve and work with 2 hoses,
double dose de-chlor and vacuum & refill at the same time. Keeping
tanks on upper floors makes temperature control more difficult, but
vacuuming easier with the hose hanging out a window feeding the
garden. Understock, overfilter, feed sparingly and use lots of plants
(I have them growing out of the tanks). Keep shrimps. The more water
volume, the easier it is.

On the maintenance scale, the worse are the carnivores, the best are
the herbivores, so your Guppies & Swords are in between.

ps: I've seen home-made self-levelling water circulation systems which
make it very easy to perform water changes (even automate them), and
done correctly, could eliminate gravel vacuuming. Depends on your
level of laziness.... I mean resourcefullness ;~)

NetMax