New E-Book Launched

As I promised in a previous blog, I have finished the first in a series of PDF E-books, electronic books. It is on the most important subject that you want to forget, guppy care. It compiles everything I have previously published on guppy care, updated and in some places re-written. And it reflects my current care regime and research. Here is the copy from the Preface to the book. The table of contents is here.

Preface from Guppy Care Simplified

I suppose the simplest book on guppy care would be one page long and contain a list of methods used by the breeder to culture guppies. In fact my own guppy care methods can be summarized in a few short paragraphs. It is that simple.
So why write an entire book on the subject?The problem is that you would have to follow my lead blindly, hoping that I had got it right. It would be a matter of faith rather than judgment.

There is already a few books out there that rely on the reputation of the author. And they are useful to read. But ultimately I think you want to be in full control of your fish room and ready to spring to action when something goes wrong in it.

That is why I have produced this book, which is different than those already out there in that I go much deeper into the subject, pulling many references from science. In the development of my own regime I have combined research with practice. That is the plan for this book.

Unlike earlier versions of this book, there is a point where I got stop penetrating into research and leave further exploration to the reader. I don’t know how helpful it is to know the exact fatty acid contents of common guppy foods. You should know that certain fatty acids promote female guppy fertility and they are found only in abundance in live foods. That will help you find your way through debates on  the relative merits of live versus processed foods.

I am going to give you the basic scientific information you need to run an efficient and healthy fish room. And I will tell you how I interpret the data and apply it in my own fish room. More detailed information is readily available on the Internet.

You may already be quite knowledgeable about fish care and just want to know the specific requirements for raising guppies. This book will give you that as my direct experience includes culturing guppies for twelve years.

Silverado. One of the strains I have bred and raised.

Some History

I can tell you the first year I kept guppies was a disaster. The guppies I bought at the local fish store died shortly after giving birth. I raised the fry to adulthood. They give birth and promptly died.

(Yes I did raise guppies when I was twelve years old and I had trouble keeping them alive back then. But that is so long ago I don’t really remember.)

That first year I went to a guppy show where I stood up in a meeting and told  the audience that anybody who could keep a guppy alive for a year deserved to be called an expert guppy keeper.

People seemed unimpressed by my statement.

I haunted an Internet forum. I got lots of contradictory advice. It seemed everybody had a different way of looking after guppies.

I researched fish care on the Internet and at the library. I dug way deep into the subject, reading all the scientific papers I could lay my hands on because that information is the most reliable.

Here it is twelve years later and I am still tinkering, looking for an even simpler solution. As a matter of fact, it is only recently that I have reached the point where I think I can in the words of Tony Soprano, “just forget about it.”

In retrospect I should not have been so surprised about how difficult guppy culture can be. After all the guppy has been bred for show or sale for the past 100 years...bred for show not for health and durability.

A hundred guppies are kept in a small tank of water and fed too much. The filter in the tank quickly fouls and the water becomes polluted with fish urine and fecal matter, along with decaying food.  The conditions domestic guppies have to endure are vastly different from the streams of fresh water wild guppies inhabit.
On top of that guppies are exposed to diseases that come from tropical fish inhabiting other parts of the world. Domestic guppies just don’t have the same immunity of their wild ancestors and they live in a vastly different environment.

I have a 45 tank fish room,  about half 5 gallon tanks, about half 10 gallon tanks and a couple of  20s.  I have one 75 gallon planted tank housing a colony of feral guppies. Given my decision to invest as little time as possible  in the care of my guppies, it’s safe to say my fish room is more appropriately called the “guppy slums.” It’s crowded and lacks indoor plumbing. The dwellings are barren.  But my fish are healthy, and as far as I can tell, happy. I guess money or complicated aquaculture technology can’t buy happiness.

I am still doing the bucket brigade,  manually changing water one bucket of water at a time.  “At some point in the future,” I keep telling myself,  “I am going to install a drip system, where the water in the tanks is gradually refreshed by dripping water that overflows to a drain.”

Water weighs 8 pounds a gallon, so I keep telling myself that water changes are actually good for my health.  Have I reached the point where I can no longer change. Are things as simple as possible, can they no longer get simpler?

I have done everything I can to simplify guppy care. That has been the strongest motivation for my research. Simple technology in the fish room, simple maintenance procedures, that’s the rub.

So this book will be most  useful to those who share my innate laziness, my lack of fascination for the plumbing involved in the hobby and those who would rather eat a pizza than do water changes.

Why this book is so long...

Internet or coffee house discussions of guppy growth, health, care and biology remind me of the story of the old blind men and the elephant.

I don’t remember exactly how the story goes, but these old blind men had never even heard of an elephant. So when they encountered one in the jungle one day, they returned to the village and had very different accounts of what they had “witnessed.” They fell to arguing because each provided a different account.

One had felt the elephant’s ear and thought the elephant was a thick, wrinkled sheet flapping in the wind. One felt the elephant’s stomach and described a sandy rock. Another felt its leg and described the very thick trunk of a tree. Yet another felt the elephant trunk and in a quivering voice told of the thick-bodied snake. Well, you get the picture… the old blind men certainly did not quite “get the whole picture.”

Getting the whole picture with guppies means studying all the factors that contribute to their health and growth. It is not a single thing, like somebody’s amazing growth food. Or peat in the filter. Or exposure of fry to a certain lighting system. So it is worth studying all facets of guppy care to get the whole picture, rather than a piece. You will have a much better chance of making sense of the advice abounding at guppy meetings or on the Internet, often contradictory, and sometimes dangerously wrong.

The old practitioners of the hobby are actually quite valuable to the novice. They have had first hand experience in the life and death of guppies. They are witnesses. But like all witnesses, you must use judgment in listening to them and try to fit the whole picture together from piecemeal evidence.

In this little publication, I will first provide a quick overview, a distillation of what I learned about keeping guppies healthy and breeding them.
Then, as it is my method in my books, I expand out to the greater depth of the book, but constantly reiterate my simple care methods in the light of research.
I have given scientific sources of information special emphasis, because scientists have the tools and discipline to separate fact from fiction. But I have also tested the ideas against what I found in my own fish room, validating with my own eyes what I have read. Hopefully you’ll find what I have gathered here useful as you feel forward in the dark, trying to understand how to keep your little charges alive, healthy and growing.

I also cover the practical matter of setting up and running a fish room. The advantage of running an efficient fish room is that you will have more time to devote yourself to their appreciation and breeding. If you do it right you will find you can manage a lot more tanks, and that means more diversity in your fish room.
How simple is guppy care for me after all this research and practical experience?

My guppy medicine cabinet has only four products in it, which I use to remove parasites from incoming fish. I rarely use them in my fish room.

• I spend four hours a week on fish room maintenance for 45 tanks. That is about 5 and a half minutes per tank. That is the direct result of the research I have done.
• I keep only two tanks for each strain, one as a backup.
• I wipe down tanks once every two months on average.
• I use live baby brine shrimp and a high quality fish food. Feeding takes me about fifteen minutes a day.
• I have about twenty different strains or their combinations in a room that is also my office, ten feet by eleven feet.
• My tanks cost  me $10 each and they have two $5 sponge filters in them. The racks are made out of cheap wood and PVC piping. Good quality pumps are the major expense ($450 each).
• I use very few chemicals in my tanks. A half cap of water conditioner in a garbage can of water, a cap of vinegar. Some aquarium salt.
• I use coral and coral substitute in the garbage cans and bottom of the tanks.
• A couple of space heaters, a fridge and dehumidifier. Some cleaning utensils. Brine shrimp eggs, some florescent lighting and a coffee grinder.

That’s all. That’s what guppy care simplified means.

Einstein: “Things should be as simple as possible, but  no simpler.”

My motto for the fish room.

The e-book can be purchased by selecting it on the "PDF E-books" menu on the left.