Guppy Farm
The Brave New Guppy Farm
Believe it or not, the little fish that you just bought from your local pet store may have found its way there from a guppy farm on the other side of the world. This is our brave new world of international commerce at both its best and worse.
Where do guppies come from?
When most of us go to our local pet store to get some fish for our aquarium, we spend little time wondering about where exactly these fish originated. We just look at our favorite fish and try to find a good specimen that looks healthy, so that it can survive the transfer to our tank. Little does the average consumer know how much that fish may have already gone through before ever reaching that dim lit glowing aquarium at your local pet store.
Knowing where your guppy originated may give you a better sense of why so many of them don’t survive the transfer to your tank.
The majority of guppies that you find in your local pet store come from one of two places: Southeast Asia (Thailand and Singapore) or Florida. So if you live in California, you are likely to have a fish that went all the way around the world or, at least, all the way across the country.
The Guppy Farm
In both Singapore and in Florida, the guppy farm looks pretty much the same. It is made up of rows upon rows of shallow concrete containers where farmers keep the guppies. To make the financial enterprise profitable, guppy farmers keep guppies outside using the natural climate of their area to help heat the fish. This tends to work fairly well most of the time. However, sometimes nature doesn’t cooperate.
In fact, this is what happened at the beginning of this year (2010) in Florida when the temperatures fell so much the breeding ponds became dead zones. Farmers pulled handfuls of dead guppies from their ponds. This has been as devastating a blow to guppy farmers as to Florida Orange growers.
The outdoor tanks are not only meant to keep guppies at their appropriate temperature. Another benefit of the outside tank is that the rain provides you with the extra water you need to top off tanks. The special tank design keeps them from overflowing during heavy rains. Farmers still have to top water off with their own water supply, but they try to take as much advantage of nature’s freebees as possible.
Typically, tanks contain a three to one female to male ratio of guppies in order to promote breeding. Once the fries (a fry is a baby guppy) start to appear, farmers move them to another tank to help them grow. Farmers will typically lose about one in ten guppies during this process of maturing.
Guppy farmers also like to keep a close control on the types of guppies they produce. They carefully pick guppies to mate so that they reproduce prized traits that will help them sell. They are also, of course, interested in creating variety with their breeding process as well. This is another benefit that comes from having so many fish in the same tank.
Unfortunately, this also means that diseases can affect large populations of guppies. This is another problem for the farmer who is not only vulnerable to climate changes but to diseases that ravage his stock as well.
Here is a fact about guppies that may surprise you. The number one cargo of jets taking off from the Florida International Airport was actually exotic fish. Who would have thought that such a little fish could do so much.