Guppies - The 4 most common mistakes and some simple solutions 

Thank god, someone teaching bacteria seeding. Its unreal the amount of people i meet who already have established aquariums and set up new one's the slow and hard way because they never knew they could seed.

I have been keeping guppies since childhood, while I already knew some of these as a livebearer fan myself, some of these tips are new to me

As a guppy keeper l appreciate so much this video. Cycling the aquarium is crucial to establish right microbiological and chemical conditions. Best solution is adding water and/or sponge debris from same aquarium in which our fish have lived before. It's part of their home environment, except bringing flora what fishes are accustomed with, it help reduce stress.

Guppies are so illuminating!

This video is the best! Thank you. I wanted to say that your hybrid guppies are incredibly beautiful. I worked at a petstore for a while and rescued all the accidental endler/guppy babies to bring home so its so cool to see someone make them on purpose! I've always thought they looked like little opals. Moreso now after seeing yours !!!!

For anyone buying guppies and other common livebearers (mollies, swordtails & platies) from pet shops. They usually carry intestinal worms (Camallanus, Capillaria & tapeworm) and gill flukes, as well as external protozoa like Costia, Chilodonella & Trichodina, and some carry external bacterial infections. Guppies tend to be the worst for bacteria and protozoa and all of them can carry intestinal worms and gill flukes. Always quarantine new fish for at least one month before adding them to an established aquarium.

These guppies are gorgeous, I love the variations in their colouring, and the flashes of electric green, blue, and gold. They are like extremely good black opals. Excellent information as always too. Today looks like Spring has actually begun here today. That combined with one of your wonderful videos makes this a splendid day.💖🖤🇨🇦

Amazing footage of your endlers

Beautiful video as always! :)

Gorgeous fish!

Great video!!!!

This is an awesome video! As someone who works at a pet store, and own fish myself, I have noticed that most new fish keepers want what they want fast, and don't care about the nitrogen cycle. They don't want to wait for the bacteria to start up and do it's thing.

Beautiful endler/ guppies. The cycle is very important

I had a biology teacher at my boarding highschool who wanted a tropical aquarium in his classroom. I was about 15 at the time and had been keeping fish since I was 6, at this point having three separate aquariums I was taking care of at home including a reef aquarium. I was enthusiastic to help him set it up and he was taking my advice about it at first, but then he started ignoring me more and more as it went on. He wanted to get fish into the tank after only a couple of weeks of letting it run. At most I'd have recommended a couple small fish for it but instead he took the clerk at the pet store's advice over mine that it was perfectly fine to put 8 glowlight tetras into this new, tiny 20L tank. Worst of all, he kept putting way too much food into the tank which was bloating the tetras to the point their swim bladders were failing and polluting the water even worse. Sure enough, they all died and he refused to accept that the fault was on him about it.

Great looking hybrids, my endlers are breeding like crazy i love watching the little fry grow up and develop.

Great video and beautiful hybrids! I like to keep my key lines in separate tanks and bring some together to see what happens. No fish room, so they go where they fit - blue moscows in the sun room, tigers in the kitchen, gingas in the kitchen, tanakas in the den, blue golds in the office, staeck endlers in the bedroom, and a few others here and there. I'm not at all clear about blue moscow genetics, but in Oct of 22 (just checked my notes) I added a young female blue moscow to a tank with a mosaic tail male I fell in love with at a pet store that had no visible reds. I have had several generations of beautiful guppies with mosaic pattern and a lovely blue in the tails. All my tanks have lots of live plants. You mentioned guppy grass and hornwort - I have such a hard time growing those! One of my tanks has a floating mat of hygro corymbosa with lots of anubias and other slower growers on the bottom. Love to see the fry among the floating leaves. Also usually some of the adult guppies sleep in the very top leaves - so cute at night:) Currently I'm in a tank rebalance phase from removing several large trees from my backyard which has opened up a ton of light coming through my windows and is now brightening up many of my tanks. The algae is loving the extra light a bit too much and my anubias etc are very unhappy about it, however my houseplants and I are thoroughly enjoying the extra light. Hope you are having a beautiful day too:)

I love your hybrid guppies. I’d like to see a video on how you choose which fish to breed and how the babies turn out.

I love hybrid guppies. Yours are stunning

I loved your video! It was a nice relaxed watch :) Love guppies just a little more though! Poecilia reticulata is as a species solely responsible for my love for the aquarium hobby. Even so, I'm on team wingei (winGEEIIIIIIII - insert cartoon yelling seal meme here) now. I made the mistake many moons ago to add a reticulata to save my prime Endler line after I lost most to a bigger mistake (deep substrate cleanings are a no-no). The fancy girl had the stronger genes, and only today after about 20 years am I starting to see the Endler genes starting to become slightly more evident/dominant, though hesitantly. I have introduced a few female Endler's but they seem to frown upon the hybrid males. I'm not waiting another 20 so now I'm waiting for a little tank to cycle before I introduce a female Endler and my most Endler-like male hybrid, play some Marvin Gaye, play God and see what happens. I could add male Endler's, yes but that would be cheating. Thanks for the video, I might just introduce that single day of fasting!

Those guppies are impressive.

In my experience the bottled bacteria is not effective. I used an entire 250ml bottle of Stability on a 10G quarantine tank over the course of two weeks and it still wasn't cycled by the end. According to the bottle its enough for 1,000 gallons. The only one that has ever worked for me is the refrigerated stuff by Fritz. Getting a dirty sponge is definitely the way to go if you don't want to wait.

I loove your guppy content! It’s been a year and some and I still have the runt guppy one of your videos helped me save, he’s an adorable tuxedo koi male now with half black body and bright orange fins! Very small but healthy and he trusts me to the point where he swims into my hand or pecks at my tools when I’m trying to clean. Just yesterday I had to remove a piece of food stuck in his throat (he bit off more carrot than he could swallow) with a needle. He didn’t flop around, he just lay still and watched me and the moment he was returned to the water he was instantly begging for food again. I don’t think I could have done the same operation on my endlers or females, they would have freaked out and hidden away afterwards 🤔 I guess my runt boy just has no survival instincts😂

i used to have tiger endlers but they breed themselvs out and now i just have a mix kinda like you have :D i need to get some again tho

I'm not fan of plastic in aquarium but l like this castle 😄. Such decoration should be ceramic. Fishes have fun swimming through it's chambers .

The advantage to adding live plants is two-fold. Yes, live plants will have lots of beneficial bacteria which will help with the cycle. The other perhaps more important aspect is that live plants will consume huge amounts of ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, the very thing that you're trying to get your filter to achieve. I have a 30 gallon tank which contains 11 three inch cichlids, 5 fully grown rosy barbs and 2 fully grown Siamese Algae Eaters. By anybody's calculation this tank is vastly overstocked (it's only a temporary measure, a holding tank). I feed liberally and the fish are doing really well, the water is crystal clear and always tests negative for ammonia and nitrite, nitrates hover around 20-25ppm. The reason I have no problem is because I have 3 inches of substrate and the whole tank is a mass of fast growing plants, mainly Limnophila sessiliflora, probably 75% of the available space is full of plants, you can't even see through them to the back of the tank. It grows about an inch a day, it's using all of the nitrogen compounds in the water column to do so.

Those guppies are gorgeous. Could you tell me where I could get some?

I've had the same colony of platys, guppy and sword tails I've not bought a fish in years

Observant question, have you ever noticed that some fish species become less active when you get closer to the tank?

Great valued information!! Father fish has a deep substrate with dirt and lots of supplements and sand on top . Then u need to add lots of plants, with lights on for weeks 24/7, and he recommends adding a fish that you can easily replace in case it dies. It's kinda deceiving to say that you can just add fish the 2nd day with out adding the rest of the information.

Nice Hybrids… I’m breeding colors that I like also. I was wondering where you bought your guppies, their nice. 😂

I highly recommend a dirted tank, it’s so much easier and the health of my fish is better

To save my baby guppies I put a fish net secured with a rubber band over the intake of my aquarium siphon when doing water changes.

Your guppies are very pretty. Endlers, Poecilla reticulata and their hybrids. Do you try to breed new hybrid strain ? Guppies are masters in begging for food! Like medieval beggars guild near churches 😆

you could also kickstart your cycle by PEEING INTO YOUR TANK! or you can just get some cat piss too..

I can't stop laughing at myself. I'll add to that topic. *Make sure you have proper tankmates if you want multiple fishes in your aquarium. Don't be like me that I saw a cool looking fish called "Bichirs" well guess what that bichir went fat and lost most of its guppy friends😅

Optimal filtering device , if small organisms like guppies live in aquarium is internal filter/circular pump with bigger water flow and big sponge on it. Fishes are safe, surface for beneficial flora is provided. External filters can suck in fry, disaster can happen - it suck water out from aquarium, fish may die, human have flooded house 😱

You say: "Guppies". I say: "Fish Food". It just depends how ya pronounce it. The old "Tomato, Turnip" thing.😉

Now, the important question is, why do you have a serious fish addiction?

Don't bother with testing the water. Set it up right from the start and you won't need to worry about anything more than feeding the fish and watching them thrive. I live in an area with questionable water, doing water changes has killed more fish than any other thing I've done.

Add a bunch of live plants day 1, you can add fish day 2. I've done this and lost no fish on a half dozen tanks. Firmly and completely disagree that you need to let a tank sit for any extended period of time before adding fish. Plants thrive on all forms of nitrogen, they are also covered in nitrosomonas and nitrobacter, the bacteria that are responsible fot converting ammonia > nitrite > nitrate. If you don't add fish your live plants will die. If you're doing an aquarium with fake plants and gravel, don't put real fish in it. I'm a moderator on the Father Fish Shoal discord, a fishkeeping community with 12,900 members as of this writing.

I can save viewers a solid half the view time with 3 words Cycle your tank.. No need to babble blather on so long with the very basic "how 2 innoculate" Decent footage with a pompous "Here is how the plebs should appreciate my art" introduction.