fancy/feeder guppy mixes

Z

zekni

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Nov 29, 2002
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I have an 18" freshwater moray eel (Echidna rhodochilus) in a lightly brackish tank. He eats both live and dead food, but I can't keep any fish in with him I can't part with, as he'll eat whatever swims within reach. So I keep a "feeder colony" of feeder guppies in with him. Enough fry survive to adulthood to replace those that go missing, and the rest are fat and happy in the meanwhile.

This last weekend I moved and upgraded him to an 84 gal show tank from a standard 55 gal. As he is stressed from the move, I figure it will be a few weeks before he's ready to start eating again, so I went and added four gravid female fancy guppies, along with the 10 or so six week old (approximately) feeder fry (most of my fry thus far seems male... at least they have some color.. any factors that affect the sex of the fry?). I've wanted to add some color to the colony for a while now, but have figured that any fancies would be the first to get eaten, before they had a chance to spawn, as their tails are bound to make them slower than the feeders. So now is the perfect time.

My question is, obviously fancy guppies and the feeders are bound to interbreed. Does anyone have any experience whether I'm likely to end up with a bunch of feeders with slightly more color, still a bunch of feeders, or some guppies that look a bit fancy?

An indeterminate mix of all of the above?

I'm considering adding some molly females.. then I can have molly/feeder/fancy guppy mixes :rolleyes:

I'm just trying for more color in the tank when the eel is hidden away in his cave. You can barely see those poor drab feeders. He doesn't eat them very fast, so they do have good happy, wellfed lives in the meanwhile.

Thanks for any opinions,


zek
 
The fry will be a mix, some with lots of color, some without much. Eventually, they will all revert to the common look as the recessive genes are covered by the dominants. The males should still sport a bit of color, just not as much as the parents. It's possible that the gender is being altered by the high pH--I know that can impact gender of egg layers, so might affect live bearers too.
 
My question is, obviously fancy guppies and the feeders are bound to interbreed. Does anyone have any experience whether I'm likely to end up with a bunch of feeders with slightly more color, still a bunch of feeders, or some guppies that look a bit fancy?
Click to expand...

It's a complete gamble.

Out of a Feeder male X ribbon tail female I've gotton cobra snakeskins, some (uglier than feeder) males with just fancy tails, and the females all look like mom - the ribbon.

THe Cobra Ribbons X with a grass female have produced orange-tailed grasses...quite strange considering neither mom, dad, grandma, or grandpa have orange :rolleyes:
 
I have high ph and it seems nearly all my offspring were females.
 
Interesting. The more I think about it, maybe the males tend to be surviving more because they're smaller, and harder for the eel to catch.

Could temp have anything to do with it? It does with reptiles. I keep the water at about 80, which might be warm for a guppy.
 
Hhhmm, I'm not sure. When I had my first batch, the water was on the lower end of 70, and they all were pretty much females. The other batches I had were anywhere between 75-80. Some looked like they were males, because they had colorful tales, but as they got older, they had gravid spots on them. I don't know if they changed sexes or if they were females though, as I've had some pretty colorful females as well as males. For a while it did look like they had a gonopodium. (sp?)
 
guppies don't have one gene that makes them male or female, they have several that affect how they mature as males or females,
um lemme get my book so I give it to you straight

oops it is just two genes that decide the gender of the guppies just as in humans. but some male guppies have stronger expression of that and some weaker. the strong expression males develop rapidly and are puny runts compairitivly to the weak expression males that take a long time to develop and are slow to show male coloration and finage. females are the same way only just the reproductive abilities are started sooner or later depending on the expression level.

heres the rub, if an early precociously developed male mates with a late female most or all of the ofspring will be male depending on how extreme the early and late are.
if a late male mates with an early female most of the ofspring will be female.

so survival aside you might have a precociously developed male mating with a late developing female giveing you your predominatly male ofspring
 
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With guppies the more alkaline the water, generally the higher percentage of females from a birthing. The closer to neutral the water gets, the higher the equilibrium of the spawn gets, a much tighter ratio of males to females.
 
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