Starting a strain (female guppies)

[Peter McLeod]

Have seen a few posts on people wanting female guppies for breeding with a nice male they have found.

Just wanted to give a bit of advice to people wanting to start a new strain.

Have a plan.

If you are serious about starting a strain start your breeding program before you get a male. Find a female that is a good shape and size. If you want good delta tail shapes go for a female with as wide an angle on her tail as possible. A female carying some of the colour you want in your strain is good. If you are not sure go for a female with as little colour as posible.

Keep her well fed and wait for the fry to be born. She could likely be carrying fry from more than one male but at least the fry will be genetically related.

Feed the fry well and at 3-4 weeks separate the females from the males. When unsure of the sex treat the fry as a male, you don't want your hard work being ruined.

Keep the origional female if possible in a separate tank. She could be useful later.

When the females are 3-4 months of age you can start looking for a good male. Don't leave the females virgin for too long.

Put the male with the best 3-4 females. If you have limited tankspace you will only collect fry from the best (one) of the bunch. If you still have the origional female you could put her in with the male as well.

Repeat the process with separating the females again, and breed the young females back to the father. Keep doing this until either the male dies or the young females stop dropping fry and then use the (one) best male offspring from the last drop of fry. Within the next generation or 2 you will notice the fish are starting to look very similar. Now is the time to start another line. Keeping the 2 lines separate for 3-5 generations and then crossing them back to each other to help with problems comming from inbreeding.

[Keri Anne]

Very good advice Peter, however people often decide to breed guppies because of a beautiful male they "just had to get"

When that is the case may I sugest geting a few of whatever beautiful male guppy you've fallen in love with so that you can grow yourself some virgins with less risk of loosing the reason you wanted them.

Would be quite gutting to spend 3 months growing virgins and lose the one male just before you were going to breed him - if you have more than one then if something did happen to one you'd still have the genes you want.

[Peter McLeod]

True! and nothing stopping anyone from doing it that way, and no reason if you use the right male offspring that you will get decent fish. Theoretically the female should be only droping the selected males fry after the 2-3 drop.

My way is very risky, and there is always the posibility of loosing the male. It has happened to me before and it is gutting. Especially when it's a nice male, but it is a much faster way to get a strain going. I almost lost a blue strain that was origionally the strain Cees started a few years ago, by loosing both males that were with one young female that I was given. I spent the next month worrying if the young female was pregnant. She was only young and think I only got a dozen fry off her. Thankfully that was enough to keep the strain alive and after that I always tried to have reserves just in case. When tankspace was low I kept the runner up males of all the strains in another tank together.

Another way to start a strain is buying a nice female and using the best male ofspring and crossing him back to mother and sisters and grandaughters e.t.c. I have only used this way a couple of times and found it much less risky but took more effort and tankspace to fix a strain.

Using this method is probably better by only crossing the best male offspring back to his mother, and then using the resulting fry to start a breeding program.

[Keri Anne]

I have also lost a few beautiful males that I only had one of When starting up my fish room a month or so back I had a disaster in my virgin Fem tank and lost all but 1 of them. I have lost 3 males that I wanted to breed with while trying to get more virgins.

Your advise is very good and I have actually bookmarked it for my own use - just didn't want ppl who have bought some of these new imported strains on impule to get discourged.

Unfortuanately I am not in an area that Redwood can easily ship to or I may have been in the same boat - "nice males now I need some females".

*Sits and waits for Phil to breed some of his imported strains and get them out of Q.

[Keri Anne]

PS: do you still have those Blues or is Cees still breeding them?? I am seriously after some nice solid colour strains to line breed. Hope to get a 3 footer in the next 6 or so months and would love to keep solid colour males in it. (Would line-breed the strains in the fishroom to keep the display tank stocked.)

[Peter McLeod]

Haven't got any fish at all at the moment. Sent fish off to various people when my Marriage broke up. Sold an offshoot from that line to someone in palmy. Bruce used to have some of Cees's stock and I know Billaney has another offshoot from that line that is light blue and red. Prety sure the last males he had have passed on, not sure how the females are going. I also think Alan has got some of the yellow line I had. Don't think he has any to sell but you could talk to him and get put on a waiting list for when he does. Cee's and Alan helped me out heaps whe I first started linebreeding. Very good people to use to pick their brains.

Still very keen to get back into guppy breeding. I have decided over the last few months to concentrate on building up a good line of guppies devoted to neutral, and X chromosome H/B dominant females, and keep as many as I can virgin for people who want to have a go at making their own lines. Not as nice as the males but will be a challenge anyway. The reason for the neutral females is they cary very little or no colour and are more likely to pass the males colour onto her male offspring. The H/B X dominant females will be good because any male they are crosed with all offsring will be H/B but if you cross the H/B males to a no H/B female later down the line the males resulting from that cross will be non H/B because it is only X chromosome dominant, just a way to create more strains that are fairly stable without too much outcrossing.

People tend to forget about choosing nice females and concentrate on their males. Females can be nice in their own rite and it is the female especially in the delta tail shapes that can have a large impact on what the males tails eventually look like, the wider the tail on a female and the more likelyhood that her male offspring will have a wider tail. It's actually a gene on the X chromosome that makes male guppies delta, or flag, other wise the males would turn out some kind of sword tail.

Good idea keeping the young males in a display tank inside. Something good to look at and plenty of backups if things go wrong in your fishroom.

[Alan]

Sorry Peter but I have not got any of your line.

The ones I got from you were before your breakup, and I was hoping to get some from Wellington area when they had bred them up but missed out.

So I'm now trying to get some V's numbers up from some types I got of TM.

By the way, one of yours won the National Show at Napier, I think C will have a pic of that somewheres.

Alan 104

[Peter McLeod]

Cool.

There was a small petshop in Chartwell in Hamilton that were getting their guppies from someone in that area that bred double swords. As far as I could see all the males were double swords and when I bred them so were the offspring males. Since the double swords are X linked, any male you cross with a female from a proven doublesword line should produce double swords. Never got far enough into it to try crossing males from my other strains into them to see what would happen.

[Caryl]

I have 5 pics of guppies from the Show but no idea who they belong to :roll:

[Alan]

The one with the RED ticket on is mine

[Caryl]

But I cropped all the uninteresting bits off the pics Alan so none had red tickets

[Fishman]

Hi guys

I just notice that most of the fries my 5 females are dropping are mostly females, from the first 2 drops I only got about 4 males and most of them are females. Is there any reason for these and what can I do to get more males. Cheers

[Caryl]

There is a theory that temperature has an affect on sex ratio.

[Peter McLeod]

From my experience with guppies I can say the temperature theory is pretty true. Unless it was a strange co incidence.

[Fishman]

My tank temp at the moment is 26C, do I have to turn it down or up?

[Peter McLeod]

The higher temperature should increase the number of males. I wouldn't go higher than 28 though. You will increase the speed that the females drop fry but they will generally be smaller fry, and maybe more of them. The idea is quality not quantity.

[Keri Anne]

So 27-28 if you want more males? How low for mostly fems? Don't want to go too low and while I've heard the temp theory have never read anything solid about what temp influances what.

[Peter McLeod]

I have read an article somewhere. Been looking on the internet, can't find much information so I have e-mailed some people who should know of any actual studies or articles that have been done.

[Peter McLeod]

Definately no higher than 28, 26 is better, and I wouldn't go lower than 20 degrees. The males especially won't like that.

[MATT78]

Would this theory apply to all livebears?

[jayci]

What happens if you leave the females virgin for too long?

[cesarz]

What happens if you leave the females virgin for too long?

If they get impregnated they die on their first drop, or they get egg bound.

[raewyna]

"I just notice that most of the fries my 5 females are dropping are mostly females".

The comments about temperature are interesting. Another possibility is that you have female 'males'.

I read this book "Sex, color, and mate choice in guppies". I'm sure it says that because guppies have X and Y genes, when a female 'turns male' she is of course still genetically female so the babies she 'fathers' will be XX and therefore all female, some of which will also become hormonally male and function as such, but are genetically female.

It's a great book - written from a scientific viewpoint and very interesting. For anyone who wants to read it, it's only held at two universities (shown here http://nzlc.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/Pweb ... _Code=GKEY^*&PID=sIKaMddJMt4qFgWOziJw9ui-eD&SEQ=20091218090414&CNT=25&HIST=1) but you can interloan it through your local library. Charges vary according to your local library policy. Mine cost $5.

Or for a Google Books limited preview see http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=ZOlB ... q=&f=false. It gives quite a decent amount of the content there.

[raewyna]

I see the National Library link didn't work - must have been too long to cope. If you go to http://nzlc.natlib.govt.nz and search the book title you should get it OK.