Guppy Fry Care
For the time period of birth to 1 month of age

Once you’ve successfully birthed the fry there is the next step of special care that they require. These special needs are, food, water, temperature.

Food:
They fry need a high protein diet mixed with a high quality flake food that is a supply of greens.
The best protein filled food that also increases growth rate is the baby brine shrimp. Brine shrimp can be bought as frozen cubes, the adult brine shrimp is also sold but make sure the package says baby brine shrimp. Or what I’ve come to do, is I’ll by a glass vile of brine shrimp eggs and hatch them myself. This way has proven to be a little more work but the money I began to save help steer me to the hatching of brine shrimp path. If you plan on buying the cubes make sure that when you feed the fry to not just drop a whole cube into the tank.

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This could lead to pollution of the water since as the cube melts, brine shrimp will begin to spread throughout the tank. The fry can’t eat fast enough to clean up the floating mess of shrimp. So what I do is I’ll cut the cube in half then hold the frozen cube in my hand just under the surface of the water. This is a cleaner way to feed the fry, and the majority of the food is eaten which saves money as well . Now brine shrimp is extremely good for the fry, but they also need a vegetable supplement to help build and keep their immune system up, it’s also essential to help their body function properly. The best thing that I’ve found for such an important role is a high quality spirulina flake food.

Water:
I’ve read many books and articles, but from personal experience I’ve found that the batch of fry that you have born in your water are already adjusted to the water conditions and don’t need to be specially treated as say if you were just introducing a fish to your tank. Just do your regular water changes and you should be fine. Just be careful not to suck up your new finny friends

Temperature:
Now this isn’t as important as say food or water, but it’s still something to keep in mind when trying to raise healthy fry. During the summer months I actually turn off my heaters (I live in MN) and let the ambient temperature keep my tank warm. Now I just started doing this not that long ago and I observed some surprising results. It seems that with the fluctuation of the temperature in the day to the temperature of the night, that the fry seem to be healthier and more active. I’ve heard from some that this is because this natural temperature change can help build the immune system of the fry.
But I’ve also done some observing of some fry when I’ve kept a constant temperature of 81 degrees Fahrenheit, the fry had a better appetite and grew faster. I figure that because the temperature is higher that the fry can digest and absorb the food faster and with me keeping up with their appetite they have the ability to grow faster.

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This question seems to be asked a lot. It seems that just saying, “feed your pet fish for two minutes” just doesn’t do the job. So I’m going to try my best at telling you how to feed your pet fish.

First with all the types of foods out there flake food it most popular so that’s what I’m going to talk about. When feeding your fish you don’t want that much food to hit the bottom of the tank. If you have a lot of food sitting on the bottom you are feeding to much, the easiest way to change this is by making sure that the food can be eaten in one bite by the fish.

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So if you have guppies or platys or swordtails or neons etc., you want to make sure the flake isn’t the size of a quarter, but more that of a dime. Then comes the question of how long you should feed them for. Once you get the right size down for the flake, you should drop in just enough food so that it almost makes it to the bottom, but doesn’t quite make it without being eaten. The little particles that do make it to the substrate will be eaten up when your fish are grazing so no need to worry if some flake does reach the bottom. Then wait until all the food is gone, and the fish aren’t swimming around with flakes in their mouths, I will usually wait about 45 second to 1 minute before adding more food. I will add food three times at each meal time. So that means every 45 seconds to 1 minute I will add food for a total duration of 3 minutes.

Depending on the size of your fish you may have three meals a day or two.

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