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If you can't find what you are looking for below, please feel free to contact any club officer for more help. Go to the Club Info page for contact info.
Use bare bottom tanks, 2.5-5.5 gals. for babies and 10 gals. and up for guppies over 2-3 months.
Use box filters in your tanks, with filter floss and marbles to weight them down. Some prefer two filters per tank. Add a few corydora catfish (cories) to stir up waste on bottom so that it will be easier for the filters to pick up. And some dwarf ancistrus (bristlenose plecos) are great for keeping the glass clean.
Change at least 20% of your water each week, siphoning the debris from the bottom of the tank. The water should be aged or treated with a chlorine/chloramine remover if you have these chemicals in your water supply and should match the tank water in ph levels and temperature.
The ph of the water should be in the range of 6.8-7.6, but may go as high as the low 8s. (7.0-7.2 is preferable). The main thing is that the ph level be stable.
The temperature should be between 75--80 degrees (guppies 0-4 months 78-80, 5-8 months 75-77, 9-12 months 72-74). This is just a guideline. Many breeders heat there whole rooms instead of individual tanks. They then keep the youngest fish in the higher rows of tanks where the temperature is the highest and the more mature fish in the lower rows where temperature is cooler.
Your guppies should enjoy about 10-16 hours of light a day. An automatic timer should be used to turn your lights on and off . A half hour before you get up in the morning the lights should come on to give the guppies time to become active. Shortly after you have gotten up, your guppies can be feed. One to two hours later the lights can go off. About a half hour before you arrive at home the lights should come on again, the lights will stay on for 6-8 hours more. You should give the guppies at least one hour of light after their last feeding.
Newborn guppies as well as your older ones should be fed newly hatched baby brine shrimp once or twice a day. The older the fish are the less baby brine shrimp they should get. Guppies 6 months old and older, especially males, will get to fat on food as rich as baby brines shrimp. A variety of flake food and some frozen food, such as adult brine shrimp, bloodworms and beef heart, should be fed as well.
Your male guppies should be separated from the females at about 4 weeks of age. This must be done as the worst male of the lot can fertilize the females and ruin your stock. The males will also grow better if they don't have to compete with the larger females for food.
Don't overcrowd your guppies, twenty guppies per ten gallons (fish that are 5-7 months old). Always cull, cull, cull. Pet shops will always be happy to purchase your extra fish.
Join a guppy club, if there are not any guppy clubs in your area, then join an all species aquarium club and start a guppy group within that all species club. When you have 4 other members you can apply to the IFGA as a new club... Hope to see you at a show soon, good luck.
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