Feeder Guppies!

The picture is of a female (larger one) and male feeder guppy I found online, since they are so small, my camera would not get anything near this clear of an image. I was looking around for breeder guppies and most of the places I checked out only had fancy guppies for sale, but today I was lucky and found a place that had them for 10cents each. Most stores seem happy with just carrying feeder goldfish and minnows. Minnows are similar size but only problem is as far as I know they aren't live bearers like guppies are. I picked up about 20 of the cute little guys tonight and placed them into a 10gal that until recently was my live rock curing tank. I cleaned it out and set it up during the day. I left the filter parts in my propagation sump to keep the bacteria going so hopefully it doesn't need to be cycled even though I completely changed out the water. Who knows what leeches out of concrete when it cures.

The main purpose of the guppies will be to see if I can get them to breed and find out first hand if they do make good feed for Banggai Cardinals. The guppy fry that is. May seem a bit cruel but their parents are just as likely to eat the fry as the Banggai are and I'm hoping to sustain a healthy population of guppies that can support a couple pairs of Banggai in the future. For now I need to make sure the brood stock I get are healthy and clean. Hand picked them as silly as that would sound when you're picking feeder fish from a tank of many, but quality is always important.

On another note, Deedle, my Striped Mandarin, is eating frozen enriched brine shrimp without having to sneak in a few live ones to trick him. He eats about a dozen and then stops, so I probably should not dump so much dead shrimp into the tank trying to make sure he sees it and knows it's the food cloud. He lives off the same lights as the sump so when I feed him during his day time, the other tanks are having their night hours. One cube is a lot to use for one mandarin and a couple half awake fish in the QT tank. Wonder in Guppies can handle adult brine shrimp... but anyways the next step is mysis shrimp. Should try to find out where I can get live ones of those around San Francisco at a decent price.