How to feed baby fish

How to Raise Baby Fish Fry in Aquariums (and Increase Survival Rate) – Aquarium Co-Op

How to Raise Baby Fish Fry in Aquariums (and Increase Survival Rate) – Aquarium Co-Op Skip to content

Home· Freshwater Aquarium Blog·How to Raise Baby Fish Fry in Your Aquarium

One of the most thrilling parts of the aquarium hobby is getting your fish to breed. If you are taking good care of your fish and feeding them well, one day you may spot a tiny baby darting around the tank. While accidental fry are always exciting, there are several ways you can increase their survival rate or boost your numbers if you plan on selling them for profit.

1. Protect the Eggs from the Parents

Many fish do not show any parental care towards their offspring and will happily eat their own eggs that they just laid a few seconds ago. Therefore, the first step is to save the eggs from being gobbled up. Use one of the following methods based on the species and their egg-laying behavior:

If the eggs are sticky, you can provide sites for the eggs to be laid, such as yarn spawning mops, dense plants (like java moss or frogbit), ceramic tiles, or spawning cones. Once the eggs are laid, you can move the spawning site to a safer location.
If the sticky eggs are laid on the aquarium glass or other immovable objects, you can remove the parents from the tank. Another method is to manually collect the eggs by rolling them off with your fingers or using a plastic credit card.
If the eggs are freely scattered around and don’t stick to things, you can use layers of marbles as substrate to allow eggs to fall in between the cracks where the parents can’t reach them. Another similar technique is to place a mesh screen or plastic mesh from the craft store just above the bottom of the aquarium floor to let the eggs fall through. Some breeders like to put mosses or other bushy plants underneath the mesh as additional protection.

Some fish like discus prefer to use spawning cones or tiles to lay their eggs on vertical surfaces.

Most cave-spawning fish (like plecos and dwarf cichlids) are good at guarding their eggs, but new parents are often prone to eating them. If you wish to hatch the eggs yourself, use an appropriate-sized pleco cave, coconut hut, Apistogramma cave, or PVC pipe for the fish to spawn, and then take away the cave as soon as the eggs are laid.
Certain African cichlid species are mouth brooders that protectively hold their eggs and fry inside their mouths. However, some breeders choose to strip the female of the eggs (or fry) to prevent the babies from being accidentally swallowed, stop the fry from being released into the main tank, and give the mother more time to recover from her duties. This is an in-depth topic that extends beyond the scope of this article, so do your research to learn more about stripping eggs and which method works best for you.

Once the eggs have been isolated, now it is time to hatch them. Eggs, especially unfertilized ones, are prone to growing fungus, which can quickly spread and ruin an entire clutch. Larger eggs that belong to African cichlids, plecos, peacock gudgeons, and the like can be placed in an egg tumbler that constantly blows fresh, oxygenated water onto the eggs and discourages fungal infections. Another method is to place the eggs in a small, plastic container of water with an air stone for circulation, and keep the eggs warm by floating the container in an aquarium or clipping it to the side of the tank wall. You can add a few drops of methylene blue (until the water turns slightly blue) or some alder cones as a gentle fungicide, and then do a couple of 50% water changes in the container once the eggs hatch. With both techniques, use a turkey baster to remove any eggs that have fungal growth.

2. Remove the Fry

After the eggs have hatched, the baby fish still aren’t out of the danger zone. Separating the fry from the adults not only prevents them from being eaten, but it also allows them to grow bigger and faster because there is less competition for food. Additionally, it is best to keep the newborns in a smaller container so that they don’t have to expend as much energy swimming to reach their meals. A net breeder or breeder box with a clump of moss for shelter is ideal because it allows the fry to live in the same tank and water conditions as the parents. For livebearers that bear live young instead of laying eggs, you can place the pregnant female in the breeder box when she’s about to give birth and then remove the mother after all the fry have arrived.

A breeder box allows you to raise fry in the same aquarium as the adults while protecting them from predation.

When the baby fry are bigger and stronger, move them to a larger grow-out tank to give them more room to swim around. If some fry are growing faster than others, you may need to separate them out by size into multiple aquariums to prevent cannibalism and lessen competition for food. This sorting process is also an opportunity to cull any sickly fry if needed to prevent defective genes from spreading and to avoid giving customers unhealthy fish.

3. Provide Lots of Cover

For people who do not have the room for an extra grow-out aquarium, you can try colony breeding instead, in which the parents and young are raised in the same fish tank. While this approach may not yield the highest number of offspring, it is certainly easier in terms of time, cost, and space. To increase the fry survival rate, the key is to provide tons of little nooks and crannies where the babies can escape into but the adults cannot fit inside. For example, breeders often make DIY fish fry traps using floating pond plant baskets or craft mesh rolled into a tall cylinder using zip ties. This allows you to either place a pregnant livebearer inside the trap so that the fry can escape out the holes, or vice versa where the parents are outside the trap and the fry can swim inside for safety. A giant wad of Easter basket grass is also used by breeders to create a dense mass that only the tiniest babies can swim in between.

If you prefer a more natural-looking form of shelter, a thick jungle of live aquarium plants also serves the same purpose. Our favorites for colony breeding include java moss, Pogosteman stellatus ‘octopus’, water sprite, and floating plants with bushy roots (like dwarf water lettuce and frogbit). Some species prefer a pile of rocks with small gaps in between for the youngest fish to squeeze past. Finally, aquarium decorations and small artificial caves can provide additional hiding places for fry to dart behind if being chased.

For colony breeding, adding lots of aquarium plants can help hide your baby fish.

4. Keep Good Water Quality

Baby fish are less hardy than adult fish and therefore can be more sensitive to any toxins or excess waste in the water. Make sure to include gentle filtration like a sponge filter, and regularly maintenance the filter so that it doesn’t become clogged up with fish poop. If you’re using a hang-on-back (HOB) or other filter with an intake tube, cover the intake with a pre-filter sponge to prevent little ones from getting sucked into the motor.

Since you will be feeding the fry a lot, consider doing daily or multiple water changes per week at first. This part can be a little stressful because no one wants to accidentally vacuum up any babies. When cleaning a breeder net or small container, a turkey baster is a nifty tool for carefully removing small amounts of water. For grow-out tanks, you can also create a tiny aquarium siphon using a length of airline tubing. Attach one end of the tubing to a chopstick with rubber bands, and then place that end into the aquarium water. The chopstick allows you to easily maneuver the siphon and avoid the baby fish. Use your mouth to suck on the other end of the tubing to start water flowing through the tiny siphon, and then place that end into a white bucket for collecting dirty water. The white bucket allows you to more easily see any fry that accidentally escape so that you can retrieve them using a turkey baster or little shrimp net. You can also have the siphoned water stream into a fish net or breeder net clipped to the side of the bucket, which will then collect any fry that escape.

Make a DIY fry siphon out of tubing, a chopstick, and rubber bands for cleaning grow-out tanks.

5. Feed Tiny Foods Multiple Times a Day

Fry have tiny mouths and tiny stomachs, and just like human babies, they must constantly eat all throughout the day. Newly hatched fish come with a yolk sac that feeds them until they are strong enough to freely swim and look for food. Then they require multiple small meals, up to 3-5 times a day if possible. You can set alarms on your phone or even use a automatic fish feeder for larger foods. The smallest newborns (e.g., rainbowfish and tetras) should be fed nearly microscopic foods like green water, infusoria, fry powder, and vinegar eels. Larger newborn fish (e.g., livebearers and African cichlids) can almost immediately eat crushed flakes, Repashy gel food, and Easy Fry and Small Fish Food.

Hatching live baby brine shrimp to feed your fish fry is the best way to increase their growth and health.

However, the #1 fry food that every veteran fish keeper and fish farm knows will bring out the best growth and numbers in your breeding projects is live baby brine shrimp. Not only are they packed with highly nutritious proteins and healthy fats, but they also actively swim in the water column, triggering your baby fish’s hunting instincts so that their bellies become filled with delicious, pink crustaceans. If you haven’t tried hatching your own baby brine shrimp, check out our step-by-step tutorial and give it a try.

Learn More

Recent blog posts

Care Guide for Green Neon Tetras — Perfect Nano Fish for Planted Tanks
How to Pick the Best Fish Foods That Aquarium Fish Can’t Resist
Top 10 Aquarium Fish That Love Hard Water
Care Guide for Cherry Barbs — Peaceful Barb for Community Tanks
5 Quick and Easy Tricks to Improve Your Aquarium Filter

Featured Products

Back to Freshwater Aquarium Blog

Use left/right arrows to navigate the slideshow or swipe left/right if using a mobile device

How to Feed Aquarium Fish Fry

Shirlie Sharpe

Shirlie Sharpe is an aquatic expert and writer with over three decades of experience keeping and raising ornamental fish. She has consulted with The Minnesota Zoo and the National Aquarium. Shirlie has also authored a book on setting up aquariums.

Learn more about The Spruce Pets' Editorial Process

Updated on 12/02/19

Reviewed by

Nick Saint-Erne

Reviewed by Nick Saint-Erne

Dr. Nick Saint-Erne, DVM, is a highly accomplished veterinarian and writer who has treated zoo animals and exotic pets for more than 35 years. He has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to improve pet store animal care among other endeavors. Dr. Saint-Erne is part of The Spruce Pets' veterinary review board.

Learn more about The Spruce Pets' Veterinary Review Board

Kai Schreiber / Flickr / CC By 2.0

The key factors to keeping the fry alive and healthy are keeping the water and environment clean, protecting the fry from adult fish, and providing proper nutrition. Most fish owners already know how to take care of the first two, but feeding fry is often the stumbling block that new breeders run into. Newborn fish cannot eat the same foods as the parents, so the challenge is providing the proper food until the fry grow large enough to eat standard foods.

Fry Type

Keep in mind that young fish will eat different foods at different stages of their development. Likewise, different species of fish have somewhat different needs. For instance, newly hatched Discus fry feed off their parents' slime coat for the first few days of life and therefore do not need to be fed until they have grown past that stage. It is wise to study the species of fish you are breeding to determine if the fry have special feeding requirements.

Taking a broader view, there are two general types of fry, those that are hatched from eggs and those that are born live. Fry that are born live are larger and have developed more fully than those hatched from eggs. Consequently, these live-born fry have a larger mouth than the typical fry hatched from an egg, and can, therefore, eat larger foods from the start. It is quite common for live-born fry to eat a finely ground version of the same foods as parent fish.

Fry from egglaying fish are smaller when they hatch and often are not free swimming for the first few days. In these cases they remain at the site where the egg was attached, feeding off their yolk-sac until they begin to swim free on their own.

Feeding Stages

Fry that are freshly hatched have very tiny bodies, and can only eat the smallest of foods. However, they are growing rapidly, and have demanding nutritional needs. This stage is particularly critical, as newly hatched fry can starve to death quickly. Some of the best foods at this stage are infusoria, freshly hatched brine shrimp, and green water. These foods must be available immediately when the fry hatch, as they cannot wait even one day for foods to be prepared. If the previously described foods are not available at the time the fry hatch, egg yolk preparations, and commercially prepared fry foods are good alternatives that don't require a lot of time to prepare.

Once the fry have passed the first week or two of life, they are generally large enough to eat similar foods as the parents, just in smaller portions. Virtually all purchased foods, either flake, pelleted, or freeze-dried, can be ground to a fine size that fry can eat. This article describes simple steps for creating your fry foods, using simple tools that you probably have on hand. As the fry grow larger, you can make the food particles larger until they can eat the same size food as the parent fish. Keep in mind that although the fry may now be eating the same foods as the parents, they need to be fed more often due to the small size of their stomachs.

Fry Foods

There are several basic high-quality foods that most fry will do well on. As previously mentioned, these foods must be on hand at the time the fry hatch, and the supply must be continuous until they can eat traditional foods. So prepare ahead of time to ensure you have what you need. Aquarium clubs come in handy when rearing fry, as there are often members who can help you in a pinch. If you want to breed and raise fish, consider finding a local club for support.

Infusoria: Infusoria grows naturally in most tanks, particularly those with live plants. However, there may not be sufficient quantities to sustain the full hatching of fry. Therefore, it is helpful to culture your own infusoria to ensure having an adequate amount. This infusoria article from your Guide gives plenty of tips for growing your own culture.
Brine shrimp: Few things can rival the nutritional value of freshly hatched brine shrimp or the appeal it has to virtually all fish. If you choose to raise it yourself, you will have to start the culture before the fry hatch and keep it going for a while to ensure the fry have sufficient quantities. Another option that owners use is a commercially prepared live brine shrimp preparation, or frozen baby brine shrimp.
Green water: Green water is exactly what it sounds like, water with microscopic algae growth that turns it green. It makes excellent first food for young fry and is easy to grow. Simply take a gallon jar and fill it with aquarium water, scrape some algae out of your tank and add to the jar (if you have no algae, a bit of grass will suffice). Add a few drops of plant fertilizer, then leave the jar in full sun. Within a matter of days, the water should be green and teeming with microscopic nutrients that are ideal for your fry. Take a few ounces out of the jar for each fry feeding, and replace it with treated freshwater.
Egg yolk: Egg yolk is a power-packed food that is easy to make into preparation for newly hatched fry. Hard boil an egg, take the yolk and wrap in a small piece of gauze, compressing it so small portions protrude through the cloth. Hang it in the tank and the fry will feed off it. Remove and replace daily for the first several days.
DIY fry food: Live born fry, or fry that are a week or more old can usually eat finely ground foods, that you can prepare yourself.
Purchased fry food: Commercially prepared fry foods.

Live-Bearer Development Period Inside Female and as Fry

How to feed guppy fry in the first days at home?

Many of us have or have had an aquarium with fish. Some buy it for decoration, while others simply because of their love for waterfowl. Guppies are one of the most common types of fish due to the fact that they are extremely unpretentious and have a rather attractive color. This variety belongs to the viviparous, and the cub, which is called the fry, is born almost fully formed.

The correct development of all living beings often depends on nutrition. How to care for small guppies, what and how to feed - we will tell in this article.

Care, nutrition and maintenance in the first days

At the beginning of their life, newly born guppies are placed from the general aquarium into another container, where adults cannot harm the fry. For newborn inhabitants, 5-6 meals per day are required, but care must be taken to ensure that all food is eaten at one time to avoid sedimentation of food residues. This greatly increases the nitrogen content, which is dangerous for guppies and can lead to their death. As for the volume of food, then fry eat much less compared to adults. And dry food must be thoroughly rubbed between the fingers to a powder state.

In the first couple of weeks the light should be on constantly . It is during this period of time that the fry grow rapidly. Only after 3 months already grown fish can be moved to their relatives without fear for their safety. Initially, guppies receive an amount of food that exceeds their weight by 60%. After 2-3 weeks, their diet begins to balance, and the rest of the time they consume only 15-20% of their weight.

Only after birth, the fish are fed "live dust" or microscopic organisms. It can be ciliates, kolovrats, microscopic worms and others.

Birth of fry

After one fertilization, the female is able to give birth for a year in the absence of a male.

Labor lasts 1-24 hours. The end is hard to define. Leave the female with the fry for 24 hours. If there are plants, the loss of juveniles is minimal.

Quantity

How many fry a guppy gives birth to depends on the age and size of the female, on the number of births and the variety.

Difficult to calculate in a community aquarium. Usually 15-60 individuals. A female can eat a certain amount during childbirth.

What they look like

Guppy fry are born fully developed. Able to eat on their own. Hiding from adult fish.

2-4 mm long. Colorless to transparent. With big black eyes.

How they grow

The growth rate is affected by the volume of the aquarium and the quality of the water.

During the first week of life, the fry gains a length of 5–7 mm. By the end of the second - up to 20 mm. They reach full size (40–60 mm females, 20–40 mm males) and reach sexual maturity at 4–5 months.

How to distinguish by sex

Sex differences appear 14 days after birth.

Males are slimmer. Color appears. Females have a smoothly defined protruding abdomen and a dark spot next to the anal fin.

How and what to feed guppy fry

A newly born fish has a microscopic mouth opening. Gupiks do not know how to bite off and grind food, they capture the food entirely. This means that fry can only eat the smallest food, ground into dust. The one who cares for guppy fry must monitor the frequency of feeding and the quality of food components. If the fish eat too often and much, it is harmful to their health.

Feeding frequency

The first 5-7 days are decisive: if the fish survive this week, they will most likely grow without problems. In the most important period, it is required to calculate the norms and schedule for feeding guppy fry:

every 4 hours - in the first week;
4 times a day - until the end of the second decade;
then switch to three meals a day.

"Live dust" - the nutrition of fry begins with it. It is an ideal food, suitable in size and energy composition.

Natural foods

Fry grow best on live food. Protein promotes active growth. Mobile larvae, worms, protozoa awaken the instinct of a hunter in the gupiks. Infusoria - "live dust" 0.15-0.25 mm in size is suitable for the smallest fish.

"Live Dust" - infusoria shoe

You can grow food for fry yourself at home: pour some of the water from the aquarium into a jar and put it on the windowsill. In a few days, phytoplankton will appear - the smallest algae. This food is drawn into a syringe and released into a vessel where newborn guppies are kept.

A little later, you can feed the fry with Artemia larvae, nauplii. This is a high-calorie food, it often causes obesity in fish and is used as a delicacy. However, he has a replacement - a microworm, a nematode. At the age of one month and older, fry can feed on bloodworms, tubifex and other larvae. In addition, grown-up fish can be safely given dry food by rubbing it between your fingers.

Commercial food

Growing live food is quite difficult and not very pleasant. Therefore, you can always buy ready-made food for fish. Among branded feeds for guppy fry, several brands stand out:

Sera micropan, micron is a powder that forms a film on the water surface. The fish rise to the surface of the water and feed as needed.
Tetra mikromin is a powder food specially formulated for guppy fry. Contains vitamins, microelements. Disinfected with ultraviolet light.
Tetra biomin is a paste that is easy to use. You just need to lower the tube into the water and squeeze out a suitable portion.
JBL is a specialized food for live-bearing fish. Easily digestible proteins predominate in its composition.

Live food substitutes

Since live food is best absorbed by the digestive system, there is no substitute for it. But in the absence of larvae, worms, insects, there is a temporary alternative: food from the human table. Fry can be fed homemade food:

Egg yolk. Peel a hard-boiled egg, grind the yolk, dilute with aquarium water. Put the mass in gauze, roll into a knot and squeeze into the aquarium. This type of food spoils quickly and pollutes the water.
Curdled milk. It decomposes more slowly, the fish eat it more readily. Yogurt needs to be poured with boiling water, casein will curdle like cottage cheese. Throw the clot on a sieve, rinse from whey. Lower the lump into the aquarium, wrapping it in gauze.
Powdered milk. A real delicacy that the fry sweep away at an incredible speed. The product has a high nutritional value, but it should not be given to fish often.

It is unacceptable to completely replace live food with such products. Guppies must eat specialized foods, and fry in particular, otherwise they will get sick.

Rearing

Adult fish hunt and eat fry. Likely loss of 2/3 of the litter.

Community tank

If the mark is intended for a community tank, prepare plants floating on the surface and floating in the water column. The thickets will serve as a refuge for the fry.

Raise the water temperature to 26°C (gradually increasing over a couple of months).

Feed finely ground adult food. Top dressing: curdled milk, milk powder, vegetable food.

Change 1/3-1/4 water 2-3 times a week for the first couple of months.

Aeration and water filtration are required.

Advantages: grow quickly, do not get sick, strong individuals survive.
Disadvantages: high mortality, will not survive the breed.

In the jig

The jig (nursery, spawning) 2–5 liters for the general aquarium is purchased or made independently from a plastic bottle. With fabric walls ("net") is not recommended: an adult fish will bite the fry through the fabric.

Spawning place next to the heater and sprayer. Place the plants.

Place the female in the nursery 2-3 days before delivery. Since the change in conditions is minimal, the transplant will not cause stress in the female, and the offspring will not suffer.

After marking is complete, transfer the female to the aquarium.

Also raise the water temperature gradually to 26°C.

In the first days (3-6) feed with “live dust”, powdered and fry dry food. Add dairy and vegetable top dressings, egg yolk. For the first week, feed around the clock at 4-6 hour intervals in metered portions. Remove faeces and food residues.

In a couple of weeks, the primary sexual characteristics will appear. Separate the males. Early pregnancy is dangerous for the female.

Transfer females to the community tank when they reach sexual maturity. At the age of 4-5 months. Males - in a month.

Benefits: Litter retention.

Disadvantages: no separate conditions, additional capacity in the aquarium.

In a separate aquarium

The optimum water temperature in the aquarium is 28 °C. With a gradual decrease of 1 °C per month for 4 months. An increase in temperature by 2 °C will cause early (after 2. 5–3 months) puberty and a decrease in the size of males. Choose a heater with a thermostat.

Hardness up to 10 °F, pH up to 8.

Provide a compressor and atomizer for water ventilation. To maintain cleanliness - a filter and a siphon.

Aquarium capacity 20-60 litres.

Intense lighting. Calculate the equipment parameters on a special calculator (available on the Internet) and multiply by 1.5. Focus on fluorescent and LED lamps. They don't get hot and are economical.

If dry food is planned, an automatic feeder with a timer is useful.

Plants floating on the surface and in the water column are required. Soil is not needed: it will make it difficult to clean up feces and food debris.

First 2 weeks

Feed live dust, microworms, phytoplankton, fry dry food 4-6 times a day for the first 5 days. Do not turn off the lighting.

Add nauplii to the diet on day 6. Illumination - 12 hours a day.

Change 1/4-1/3 volume of water daily and siphon.

More than 2 weeks

Place males in a community tank: the fish are capable of reproducing.

Add daphnia and top dressing (yolk, cottage cheese, milk, vegetables, greens), mashed dry food to the diet. Feed 3-4 times a day.

More than a month - add chopped bloodworms, coretra, tubifex to the diet. Lighting 8-10 hours. The water temperature is 27 °C. Water change and bottom cleaning - 2-3 times a week.

When to plant in a community aquarium?

You need to focus not on the age of the fry, but on their size. Remember that for adult fish they are a real delicacy, so you can transplant young fish of such a size into a common aquarium that it certainly does not fit in the mouth of adults. But it is better to play it safe and wait until the fry grow to 1.5-2 cm. It is important to transplant young fish correctly.

You can't just catch them with a net and release them into a community aquarium. It is necessary during the day to add water from the general aquarium to the jig in small portions so that the fry adapt. A sharp change in water parameters can lead to the death of young animals. In the first week, the water temperature in the community tank should be close to that which was in the jig.

How to feed guppy fry so that they grow up beautiful and healthy

Nutrition specifics of live-born fry
What is needed in the first days
Power of grown fry
Live feed
Home recipes
on the shelves of the store
Video on the topic: “Folding of the frauds of the GUPPI”

9,000 viviparous fish. The fry are formed in the mother's abdomen and after birth are her exact small copies. They have a mouth, and they literally immediately begin to use it for food.

Fry are born fully formed small fish.

As long as you can't feed the guppy fry. They need a balanced diet that contains everything their body needs for development. It depends on the quality of feeding whether they will grow into beautiful and healthy adult fish. Feed for guppy fry is finely ground into pollen. They have a very small mouth and cannot swallow the same large pieces of food as adults.

Guppies are cannibalistic. Females are devoid of maternal instinct and love to eat their cubs.

Guppy fry instinctively hide in the undergrowth after hatching.

Fry need to be fed differently than adult fish:

First, more often. Newborn guppies eat up to six times a day, while two meals a day are enough for adults.
Secondly, in portions. You can not pour food for the future. The excess will settle to the bottom, and nitrogen will form in the water. If there is a lot of it, the brood will die. Feed the fry in portions that they can eat at a time. Or wait until they are full and immediately remove the remnants of the meal.
Third, more abundant. Until the age of two weeks, the fry should be given food in an amount of about 1.5 times their own weight. And then up to two months - 2 times. Only by the sixtieth day can they be transferred to moderate feeding - 15-30% of body weight.

What you need in the first days

When the fry are born, they still continue to feed from the yolk sac. But its contents will last a maximum of a couple of hours. Therefore, start feeding guppies immediately after birth.

From now until the seventh day, give them live dust and finely ground boiled yolks diluted with water. Live dust is a small living food - shoe ciliates, rotifers, microworms, brine shrimp nauplii. You can buy it at the pet store or breed it yourself.

Guppy fry are waiting for the first feeding just a few hours after birth.

Feeding should be frequent - 5 to 7 times a day. Maintain equal intervals between meals . Make sure that the fry have consistently rounded bellies. This means they are full. Don't forget to monitor the water temperature. In the first days, the optimal indicator is 28 ° C. Then it is gradually reduced every week by 2 ° C to a mark of 24 ° C.

Guppy fry less than a week old should have at least 20 hours of daylight.

Feeding grown-up fry

Teenage guppies are less fastidious in food and gladly swallow everything that fits into their small mouths. From day 7 to day 50, you can feed them with purchased dry mixes. However, it is better to offer guppies quality live food. On it, they will grow faster and acquire a beautiful bright color.

Artemia nauplii, crushed bloodworms, nematodes and tubifex will do. You can also cook homemade food.

Three meals a day are enough for older fry. Daylight hours can also be reduced to 12 hours.

Guppies are considered adults at 60 days old. At this age, you can gradually transfer them to the same diet that other fish live in an adult aquarium.

Live foods

These include any organisms that are part of the natural diet of fry in their habitat. These are tubifex, bloodworms, cortemias, daphnia, coretra, aulophorus, rotifers, cyclops. Although they are of natural origin and are present in abundance in ponds, it is undesirable to catch them on your own. There is a risk that wild crops are infected. In addition, along with them, you can bring larvae or even adults of predatory insects into the aquarium and ruin the entire population of young fish.

Freezing is a good alternative to drying in terms of food storage.

Some types of live foods are easy to grow at home. These are small daphnia, aulophorus, nematodes, grindal, microworms. Microworm Breeding Example:

mix cornmeal and water in such a ratio to get a creamy mass, and add yeast to it;
launch a microworm into the resulting nutrient medium and wait - in a few days it will give offspring.

Frozen live foods can be purchased. These are all the same daphnia, tubifex, aulophorus and other cultures. But they contain fewer beneficial micronutrients, so use them only if you cannot find an alternative to them.

For independent breeding, start several crops at once, as it is rarely possible to get a lot of feed from one. So you can alternate them, and your fry will always be full.

Homemade recipes

A good protein food can be prepared from common foods. Consider several recipes for hearty and balanced homemade food for fry.

Boiled egg

Boil a chicken egg, remove the yolk and crumble it with a fork. Then dilute with a small amount of aquarium water and drip into a vessel with fry from a pipette. You can put the yolk in a piece of gauze, lower it into a container with guppies and slosh so that egg dust falls - it will become food for the young. Keep in mind that such complementary foods quickly spoil the water. If using it, change the water more often than usual.

Curdled milk

Pour boiling water over it. The casein (protein) will curdle and form a clot. Catch it with a net with small holes and rinse well from whey. Feed the fish from the net by shaking them above the water. The smallest particles of food will fall on the water surface. Unlike the yolk, curdled milk does not pollute the aquarium environment as actively.

Powdered milk

Pour fresh milk into a bowl and place it over a container of boiling water. Stirring regularly, evaporate the liquid. The resulting powder can not dissolve in water for hours, during which time it is completely eaten by fry. When buying ready-made milk powder in a store, pay attention to the composition, which should not contain anything superfluous!

Omelet

Crack 2 eggs into the pan, add 2 tsp. nettle or oatmeal and, stirring constantly, pour in 100 ml of boiling milk. Once the egg has curdled, remove it from the heat and let it cool. Chop before serving.

Cheese

Take natural hard cheese, grate on the finest grater and dry if necessary. Add it to water a little at a time, as it quickly spoils it.

Food prepared at home may be given to fry only as an addition to ration . It cannot become a complete food for them, as it does not provide them with all the required nutrients.

Newborn guppies must receive phytoplankton, algae and other components of plant origin. It is important to feed them with crushed live food.

Store shelves

Pet stores have a wide variety of dry food specially designed for fry. They differ from mixtures for adult fish with a higher protein content and a greater degree of grinding. There are options from small granules to powders.

Introduce the fry to dry food gradually. At first, give them as complementary foods in addition to live and frozen cultures, and just before resettling into an adult aquarium, transfer to them completely.

The main advantage of purchased feeds is their balance, which is very difficult to achieve on a natural diet. Manufacturers enrich them with vitamins, minerals, calcium fluoride and other nutrients that are important for the full growth and development of guppy fry.

The following brands of dry food are popular among aquarists:

MikroMin,
JBL,
sera,
Tetra.

Summary

Guppy fry begin to feed immediately after birth. For 7 days 5-7 times, in the next - 3-4 times. At first they are given only live dust and finely ground chicken yolks. Then - live and homemade food. At the age of two months, the fry are returned to the parent aquarium. As you approach this date, you need to gradually transfer them to dry food, which the rest of the adult fish eat.

Little guppies don't look like their parents and are almost transparent!

There is no ideal universal food for guppy fry. They are all good and bad in their own way. The main rules that should be followed in their feeding are systematic, balanced and moderate.