Live bearers as feeders?

[NYCguppydude]

is feeding off the parents the best idea? if you do wont that only leave you with sibling guppies to breed for more stock?

which will lead to inbreeding and deformities. He should stick with geting rid of the fry by moving guppys who are about to give birth into a seperate tank (5g) and moving them when it's over.

That has been proven to be false! Inbreeding amongst Guppies does no harm! What does cause harm is letting them breed all willy nilly without any "culling"(predation) from you to remove the week and deformed from the gene pool before they are able to breed and pass off the "bad" genes!
Some of the most popular Fancy Guppy strains have been inbred for over 20 years easy!

 

[Piranha86]

which will lead to inbreeding and deformities.

NYCguppydude already covered it, but yeah, they've actually found that with livebearers, it's better to inbreed. This applies to other fish as well, for example, if you cross ranchus from different lines, you will get dorsal fins and single tails and sometimes no wen. Fish genetics are different from human genetics.

 

[tanker]

Wait---Can you buy/feed crickets?? They even come in cans.

 

[bettalover]

I have a 37g tank full of butterfly goodied i use as feeders for my gars, bichirs, and ebjd... I think goodieds are a better choice since their youngs are born big at birth and they are as prolific as guppies.

 

[Jannika]

That has been proven to be false! Inbreeding amongst Guppies does no harm! What does cause harm is letting them breed all willy nilly without any "culling"(predation) from you to remove the week and deformed from the gene pool before they are able to breed and pass off the "bad" genes!
Some of the most popular Fancy Guppy strains have been inbred for over 20 years easy!

Yes, but without the inbreeding, most of this "culling" would not be necessary, so I think user_name is generally correct.


From BioMed - Evolutionary Biology


About Guppies:

"Inbreeding has detrimental effects on individual fitness in the wild [1] and in captive-bred populations [2]. This inbreeding depression is often manifested as low offspring survival [3], reduced fecundity and fertility [4,5], or decreased resistance to diseases and parasites [6,7]."

"Adding unrelated individuals to populations suffering from inbreeding depression can immediately and dramatically increase heterozygosity and lead to an immediate improvement in fitness-related traits. This is known as genetic rescue [21-23]."

"Inbred males courted less and spent less time following females compared to outbred males [44]. Similarly, populations from Trinidad suffer inbreeding depression in various fitness traits even under modest levels of inbreeding [45,46]."

Conclusion

"We have shown here that inbreeding affects population growth, and that this effect can be underestimated or overlooked. The high degree of inbreeding depression was only revealed by the addition of immigrants, as before that the inbred populations appeared to display normal growth rates following seasonal patterns."

 

[gordonw]

Also, I don't know what kind of fish you have but some people keep marmokrebs and feed the babies to their fish. They are a self cloning crayfish. Each one will have it's own set of baby crays.

I have marbled crays now set up in a 50g, they are great feeders for my GSP, senegal bichirs, and JD. Now have a 20g filtering and cycling so i can do a livebearer feeder farm as well.

 

[gordonw]

its quite entertaining to watch the senegals and JD compete for the baby crays

 

[RazzleFish]

I have breeding operations going for both crickets and mealworms. Depending on what you want to feed them to, this might be easier and cheeper.

 

[jetajockey]

I've raised and breed some mollies before, however, I need to start up a "farm" if you will. My problem is that I have predatory fish, they will not take pellets, and worms are not always available IE the store I can get them from often is out of stock for weeks.

You can get your fish onto pellets, it just takes work. Cut back on the live/thawed foods and keep introducing pellets, they will eventually get hungry enough to eat them.


I would go with guppies as feeder stock, but keep in mind that it will take some effort to keep enough stock if you have several fish that are eating them regularly.

I still suggest that you shift them over to pellets, I suggest NLS thera+a pellets.

 

[Pooshybear]

I went out and bought some guppies, 6 females (now 5 heh) and 2 males. The males have already started nudging the females, some of the females have black spots near their anal fin, the one female that did not have a black spot was feed to my LMB. Yes, I'm keeping a LMB, which isn't too bad. I found a place that takes in native fish, and has a very large tank for them (like cabelas sized). However they said my bass is too small right now, so I'm keeping him till he is acceptable in size.



I'd imagine I should start seeing fry in a matter of weeks?

Also, the LMB has the most personality I have ever experienced. For a predatory fish, hes pretty docile, I got fed up with finding a clown loach in my other tank constantly getting sucked down to the sump, so I plopped the loach into the bass tank, and he's been fine for the past week.