- Hi everyone, it's Cory from Aquarium Co-Op.
Today I'm going to teach you how I breed
Red Russian Lace guppies.
Guppies aren't that difficult, but producing
them in big numbers and I can show you
some easier methods and things like that.
So, let's get to it.
So these are my Red Russian Lace guppies.
And we'll zoom in on some so you can
see what we're talking about here.
Big flowy tails, and that's not a perfect tail
so that's why he's just being used
as a breeder, he probably got nipped
when he was young.
Some of the other ones are growing up,
are coming around looking great.
And we breed these for the store.
So yeah, here's the general tank,
and the first thought is, "Wow,
"look how much algae is in there.
"Wow, that looks horrible."
Yes, I completely agree, except,
it is super beneficial to raising fry.
So all that algae that's in there, one,
as it grows, it will consume waste.
That's a good thing, that's keeping the water clean.
If we look at the very back here,
we can watch that guppy up top.
You see it's eating on it.
It's literally pulling and eating, so that's giving
that female more nutrition.
Even though we're feeding the tank a lot,
there's always something they can go feed on.
See, she went and picked up a piece
of fish poop, and she's constantly
preening this algae.
So, it doesn't have to be algae, it could be
lots of live plants, it could be Easter grass,
it could be just lots of cover but that's
what allows you, this is a 40-gallon breeder tank,
to have all these fry swimming around is the cover.
So it just so happens that live plants work nicely
at keeping fish alive and hiding them from parents
and things like that and there's all kinds
of stages in here.
You can see tiny, tiny newborn fry.
There's every stage in here.
And this is one of the ways I like to make
fish like this, is in this,
community style, where they're going
to raise them up, they tend to be less predatory,
that type of thing.
I've also raised shrimp in here,
so you can see there's lots of orange shrimp.
It's one of those things that, if I was
moving this algae, which is just like moss
and things like that, you'd be shocked
at how many babies and things there are.
So back to breeding them.
We want hard water, we want higher pH.
I would say we don't want under 7.0.
And we definitely want some minerals in the water,
and so I use crushed coral in all of my
guppy breeding setups or any libraries, for that matter.
That's going to help keep both those going for me.
And then, I run a sponge filter.
It's encased in algae at the moment
which is a good thing, that means no babies
are getting sucked up into a filter or anything
like that, and then I also use an Eheim auto-feeder.
That's going to feed four times a day,
on top of what I'm feeding, which is up
to two times a day.
So this tank, at the minimum, no matter what,
gets fed four times a day, and at the best
gets fed six times a day.
That's one of the keys there, is feeding a lot,
keeping these very pregnant females full,
and then when babies come out there's food
available for them.
If we don't have food available for them,
then they tend to get eaten.
And as you can see here, in the community tank,
we're actually going to have to do some culling.
I've seen a couple of fish in here
that I don't like, like one would be this male.
He doesn't match the Red Russian Lace guppy,
so he needs to leave the pack.
Then there's, I've noticed, a couple of females,
one had a bent back and another fry
had a bent back, so when you're breeding
guppies, because we've created such a good
environment for fish to hide, it's now
our job to cull any that aren't what we're looking for.
So you might have a fish you could feed it to
or something like that, but you definitely don't
want to let it just sit in there and keep
making the line worse.
You definitely want to cull.
But in general, you want to start with
more females than males, I would say
the bare minimum you want is a trio,
a male and two females, but,
honestly, if you could start with six or nine
or 10 fish, you will be much more successful
breeding in this style.
It's a lot less work on the females,
that type of thing.
Also, I like to create symbiotic relationships
where, if my feeder was out of food or something
and these guppies would get really hungry
they can feed on these shrimp.
Go hunt them and eat them and,
oh no, there goes my shrimp.
But, I don't lose my fish that I'm breeding.
Vice versa, if I overfeed these fry at all,
let's say I catch 50 of these out and I sell them,
then I need a cleanup crew and that's where
those shrimp can help me out there.
This is definitely not a show tank.
It definitely is a breeder tank, it's a money-making
tank, it's a tank that produces.
And most times I would tell people
that you can choose one, you can have a show tank
or you can have a breeder tank.
When you start trying to do both,
you'll just end up compromising one of the two.
Eventually algae will set in on that show tank,
and then you're going to have some problems.
You can't use chemicals, that type of thing.
But this is one way I like to breed
the Red Russian Lace guppies, and in future videos
we'll show you other ways to do it.
You can do it more mass production,
you can be catching females, you can be using
many tanks, but what I like about this system
is it's one tank, one strain, and it produces well.
And I enjoy it, I love walking up to a tank
and just seeing all the fish,
and we'll feed right now so you guys
can see what happens when feeding goes on.
So we're going to watch this food come in.
The fish, they absolutely love to eat.
You can see food's making it by them,
and that's all the food the fry are going to eat.
You can see the fry are hanging out low,
they're smart, they're going to hang out
in the weeds so they don't have to come out
and they can live their life out in the algae
until they're big enough to come compete
with all the other larger specimens here.
Yeah there was that fry I was talking about
having to cull.
It's hard to get it on camera, I see it
and then I go to get it in camera frame.
But of course, it's moved.
But yeah.
That feeding happens at least four times a day.
There it is.
That fry right there swimming around,
see how it's having a hard time keeping
its buoyancy, a little bit of deformity
to its back there, something like that
needs to be removed from the gene pool
or it is going to muddy the line.
So that's what we mean by culling
and looking for deformities.
It's just a numbers game, if you make
5,000 fish or 100 fish or 500 fish,
X amount of them are going to come out
not perfect, and that would be
our job to fix that.
There's another male here we're watching develop.
And if that guy doesn't get the pattern I want,
he's got to come out, too.
That being said, most males in here,
uniform pattern, they've got that nice
snakeskin pattern of the body with the
grass-type tail, the lace.
So this is a way to produce fish.
It's not the best way to work on a line.
If you're working on a line, that's a whole
different video where you're sitting at
multiple tanks and choosing features
and things like that.
This is just how to improve a population
and maybe sell to your local fish store,
something like that or just make a bunch
that you can enjoy.
Well, I hope that shows you how I do
Red Russian Lace guppies.
Make sure you check out other videos,
we'll show you how we breed other things.
We show you how to build the fish room
that's behind me.
What else do we do?
We show you Quick Tip Tuesdays,
where we're showing you different
little tips and tricks in the fish room.
We've got Real Fish Talk where,
sometimes we rant about things,
talk about subjects in depth, whatever
you guys want to hear and that happens
on Sundays, and then videos like this
tend to show up on a Friday where I'm
just showing what I'm doing and telling
people how I do it.
Because that's what I enjoy watching as well.
Until the next video, we'll see you next time.
Thanks for watching.