Flashy Fish : Data

1. If being flashy attracts predators, why are male guppies so colorful? 
They are colorful to look good for the lady guppies.

image source : http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/5026642191/sizes/m/

2. What do you think is responsible for the variation in color from one generation to the next? 
Natural selection

3. Select a hypothesis from the Sex and the Single Guppy Web activity or come up with your own and record it here. 
Predators are causing guppy populations to become more drab by preying on the most brightly colored individuals and eliminating them from the gene pool.

4. Next you will set up your experiment as directed in the simulation. Record your initial settings here.
Predator types and numbers: 30 rivulus Initial guppy population: mostly bright

5. Run your initial experiment for at least five generations and record your results here.
Number of guppies: 231
Number of generations: 6
Number of weeks: 102
Male color types: brightest, bright, drab, drabbest
Brightest male guppy: 70%
Bright male guppy: 20%
Drab male guppy: 7%
Drabbest male guppy: 2%

6. Was your hypothesis supported by your data? If so, why? If not, you may want to change your hypothesis and rerun your experiment.
No, my hypothesis was not supported by my data. The guppies multiplied like rabbits and the bright/brightest ones dominated over the others.

7. New hypothesis: Predators are causing guppy populations to become more drab by preying on the most brightly colored individuals and eliminating them from the gene pool.
Record your new data here.

My settings this time were mostly bright, and all 3 predators.
Number of guppies: a lot
Number of generations: 9
Number of weeks: 236
Male color types: brightest, bright, drab, drabbest
Brightest male guppy: 1%
Bright male guppy: 1%
Drab male guppy: 33%
Drabbest male guppy: 65%

8. Was your new hypothesis supported by your data?
If so, why? If not, redo. Yes, my hypothesis was supported by my data. All the bright ones basically died out and the drab ones multiplied like rabbits.

9. Summarize what you learned from your experiments.
I learned that it is better for guppies to blend in than brightly stand out. Even though sex selection seems more important than natural selection, the results say differently. Flashy Fish: Discussion Questions

1. Why do some guppies tend to be drabber than others? 
They’re adapting to blend in with their surroundings.

2. Why do some guppies tend to be more colorful? 
The bright colors attract females.

3. What role does color play in guppy survival? 
The brighter they are, the more they will attract predators. If they are drab, they won’t find a mate very easily, but they have less of a chance to get eaten.

4. Explain the push and pull that the environment has on the coloration of guppies in Endler’s pools. 
The brighter they are, the more they will attract predators. If they are drab, they won’t find a mate very easily, but they have less of a chance to get eaten.

Source : http://bails.wikispaces.com

How to Care for Baby Guppies

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Guppies are beautiful friendly freshwater fish that reproduce very easily. Their fry are very easy to take care of if you know what you are doing.

Steps

Survey your tank setup: Guppy fry are an excellent food source for most types of fish (even their parents). Separate fry from adult fish if possible. Placing them in their own separate tank is best, but if you do not have an extra aquarium you'll need to get a mesh "breeding tank". These devices go inside your existing aquarium, and serve as a holding pen for the fry or the adults. If you are going to keep the fry in this container, make sure it is mesh, otherwise they might swim out.

1. Check the Water quality: Guppy fry will grow fast when their water quality is good. To keep it pristine conditions use a test kit and test for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. Keep ammonia at 0 ppm., nitrite at 0 ppm., and nitrate at less than 10 ppm. Keep doing weekly water exchanges, but exercise caution not to suck up any fry.
   
2. Be sure you feed them well: Baby guppies need high quality foods to grow and be healthy. When they are first born use fry food or finely crushed flake food. As they get bigger keep using flake food.
   
3. Use a sponge filter or a very low power mechanical filter to keep water clean. Make sure the filter has some kind of protective sponge over the intake to prevent small fry from being sucked in.
   
4. Keep the water temperature at 75-80F. Do not let the water temperature get outside this range.
   
5. Check for illnesses: Diseased fry have a very low chance of surviving. Remove any sick fry immediately. Do not medicate a tank with fry in it, as it is too difficult for a regular fish keeper to use the right dosage.
   
6. Watch them grow: Monitor their growth, and place them back into the main aquarium once they are big enough not to be eaten. Make sure they are all growing fairly uniformly. Once they are all big enough, release them and watch them interact with their expanded world.
   

Tips

• Breeding guppies is fairly easy, though you might want to setup a breeding tank and keep a male and a female in it. Once the female becomes pregnant, remove the male. Once the female gives birth, remove the female.
  
• Fry are not in any way reliant on their parents. In fact, the parents will eat their newborns if given the chance.
  

Warnings

• Don't keep babies with parents or other fish; they will eat them
  
• If using a mechanical filter make sure it is very weak or has something covering the intake so the fry don't get sucked up.
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Keep Guppies Healthy
  
• How to Breed Guppies
  
• How to Know Which Fish to Put Together in a Tank
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Care for Baby Guppies. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Learn to Properly Feed Baby Guppy Fish!

Learn to Properly Feed Baby Guppy Fish!

By Johnathan Thomas

Guppies are so prolific that many people buy a pair with the hopes of breeding them for fun or profit. Some beginners, unfortunately, think that because a single female will have anywhere from 30 to 60 babies every four weeks they can just raise the baby guppy fish haphazardly and hope for the best. If the group of fry (newborn fish) dies because of neglect, there is only a short period of time to wait before the next attempt can be made.

This isn't the ideal way to learn how to raise guppies. The overall goal should be to grow healthy adult fish that people might actually want to keep in their home aquariums. If this is not done, then a beginner fish keeper's aquarium can become overrun with poor quality fish - leading to disappointment. There are a few tips about the proper baby guppy diet that can help anyone raise healthy adults!

1 -- Feed a variety of foods. In nature, fish eat whatever they can find that they can digest. This means that they are often eating something they haven't actually ingested recently. This is a clear advantage since no two foods have the identical nutritional value. A variety of foods fed to a baby guppy group will mimic this natural instinct. Some foods to consider are microworms, daphnia, and grindal worms.

2 -- Feed often. The best tip to improve growth of your guppies is to feed them regularly. Feeding up to 6 times per day can ensure that their bellies are almost always full. A full stomach means nutrients and energy are always being taken in and converted to muscle mass and other organs/tissues!

3 -- Choose your foods wisely. Young fish are attracted by foods that move. Their attention is grabbed when flake food floats by. Live foods do this job even better! Fish that are fed live foods have to swim after their meals - developing stronger muscles. Flake foods are still an important aspect of any baby guppy diet though so don't rely solely on live foods!

In case you are interested in other information about fish, John has written a lot of information about such topics. His most recent venture is a website about custom fish tanks. One topic that might be of interest is the custom aquarium which can be perfect for small guppies!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Johnathan_Thomas

http://EzineArticles.com/?Learn-to-Properly-Feed-Baby-Guppy-Fish!&id=3086624

Keeping and Breeding Guppies

Author: WaterWorks Aquatics

There are not many fish capable of brightening up a drab home aquarium quite as well as the guppy (Poeacilia reticulata) . There exceptional range of colour variations and stunningly long tail extensions have made them the most popular aquarium fish throughout the world.

Guppies are hardy little fish living a good 2-3 years in a well maintained aquarium. They grow no more than 2.3cm in size and are very peaceful towards other fish in the aquarium. Guppies will feed on most good brand flake foods but will benefit from frozen foods being used once or twice a week.Guppies do great in water of ph around 7.5 and fairly hard. Although they will acclimatise well to other conditions. Contrary to popular belief, guppies must be kept in warm tropical water at around 24 degrees c. This is critical to their well being and will encourage the fish to be active, colourful and healthy.Breeding guppies is relatively easy. They are live bearers, meaning they give birth to live young and do not lay eggs. If you are considering keeping guppies you should ideally buy all the same strain, or colour variant, and have at least 2 females to every male. This ensures that the females do not become stressed by over breeding. After mating the females will be pregnant for up to 30 days. Once the young are born you have two choices. They can be born in the aquarium and run the risk of being predated on by other fish, including their parents. Or you can buy a breeding trap that allows you to keep the fry (baby fish) separate from the rest of the tank until they are large enough to look after themselves. Fry should be fed a mixture of powdered flake food and frozen daphnia.

All in all keeping guppies can be extremely rewarding whether you keep them, to breed or just to brighten up those dull winter days.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/pets-articles/keeping-and-breeding-guppies-3858242.html

About the Author

Aquarium and Pond Supplies

Fancy Guppies Make Colorful Pets For Your Aquarium

Author: Lee Dobbins

As with many animal species, the male Fancy Guppies are more beautiful than the female Fancy Guppies. Males come in a large variety of bright colors, like red, gold, black, blue and green- while females tend to only have gray or tan colors. These fish look most beautiful in aquariums when you have several of them to swim together.

Fancy Guppies like warmer aquarium waters. You should keep your temperature set between 78 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit, and consider adding a tablespoon of aquarium salt per 5 gallons of water in the tank. Most livebearers Guppies fair better with the salt added.

While Fancy Guppies can survive on just floating flake food and freeze dried bloodworms, they will become stronger and hardier if fed some frozen brine shrimp or Black Worms from time to time.

When you put Fancy Guppies into your aquarium, you'll want to keep twice as many females as male Fancy Guppies. You can add other fish that are compatible, including Small Tetras (Neons), Honey Gourami, Cory Catfish, Glass Fish, African Dwarf Frogs and Ghost Shrimp.

Many stores will try to sell Mollies and Guppies together, but most of the larger Mollies will attack Guppies and are not really compatible in an aquarium together.

You do not want to keep Swordtails and Platies in a tank with Fancy Guppies, either. They just do not get along. Guppies should be placed into aquariums with smaller tank mates.

Fancy Guppies have a short lifespan of about 3 years. The males grow to be about 2", and females will grow a little longer at an average of 2.5" long. Sometimes Fancy Guppies will have a longer lifespan with outstanding aquarium care, and there are even instances where the fish have gotten bigger than their average sizes.

When acclimating your guppies to the fish tank, be sure to float the bag they came in, in your fish tank water for 20 minutes then slowly introduce some of the fish tank water into the bag -little by litte before releasing them into the tank. This will give your new fish the chance to adapt slowly to it's new environment.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/pets-articles/fancy-guppies-make-colorful-pets-for-your-aquarium-101703.html

About the Author
Lee Dobbins writes for Fish Tank Guide where you can learn more about maintaining an aquarium as well as see photos of different types of aquarium fish like the fancy guppies

How to Care for a Pregnant Guppy

How to Care for a Pregnant Guppy
by Darran Mansfield

Caring for guppies is usually really easy to do, but when it comes to caring for a pregnant guppy, that is very different. Certain considerations and adjustments need to be made to help her to give birth to healthy guppy fry with minimal stress.

A pregnant guppy can cause a fish keeper a great deal of stress, but it needn't be like that, as it's really not that hard to deal with. Most people think it's all going to go wrong, especially if they are new to it, but the truth is that guppies have been breeding successfully for hundreds of year on their own. Plus, since they are living in a nice clean warm tank with no predators apart from each other, they should be pretty much ok.

With all the above being said about guppies having babies on their own with no problems, that was in reference to wild guppies. However, we very rarely have a chance to buy wild ones anymore and they are all captive bred fish that have kind of had their wild instincts bred right out of them instead of importing them from the wild waters that are their natural homes.

Keeping tank born guppies does have its advantages over the wild ones if you look into it. For one thing, they don't have to endure a terribly stressful journey to the fish shop that will sell them. They are also a lot hardier and can deal with a few mistakes that the new in-experienced keeper may make.
The thing that you will notice with a pregnant guppy is that she doesn't really act any different from any of the other fish that are not even pregnant. She just goes about scouting around for food just like the rest of her tank mates.

The only time when a pregnant guppy will change her behavior is just before she is about to drop her babies, which are born live because guppies are livebearers. You will notice that she will start hiding more and more and it could take you a little detective work to try to find her. The reason a pregnant guppy will start hiding is because she is preparing to give birth to her babies within a day or two. She is hiding to try and help protect the babies and help bring up their survival rate from other fish that may be in the tank that may want to eat them.

Even though she goes to all this trouble in trying to protect her offspring, even she will eat the young herself! One way this can be prevented is to provide plenty of hiding places and make sure the female is well-fed throughout the whole pregnancy.

So, there you have it. A pregnant guppy isn't really that stressful to deal with when you simply take a step back and think about it. Things may be a bit bumpy during the first couple of births, but as time goes by you will get the hang of it and have lots of little guppies swimming around.

Darran has been writing articles online for nearly 3 years now. Not only does he specialize in Bonsai Trees, Portable BBQ's and Cooking but he also has a tremendous passion for Keeping Guppy Fish and raising tons of Poecilia Reticulata for many years. Goarticles.com