A New Guide To Breeding Gendlers, Or Any Other Fry For That Matter

Welcome one and all to my second blog; Manning's Gendlers.

This blog will basically be a step by step walkthrough on how to set up your own breeding tank, or minature tank, from scratch. For the purpose of this project, the fish I will be using are Fancy Guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and Endler's Livebearers (Poecilia wingei) to produce Gendlers (Poecilia sp.)

At time of writing, I currently own 7 Fancy Guppies in my small semi-planted 64L tank. They are all beautiful and it has taken me many months to find such a wide range of colour diversity. I just have 2 problems with them:

1. - No matter how much I love them, they are very common fish, when you say to someone you keep Guppies, they just glance you over like you're a newbie.
2. - It's taken me 8 months to find these 7 and they only live for a year, I'm not spending another 8 months finding another lot!

The aim of this project is to create viable and attractive offspring which no one else has in their tank. The secondary aim is to continue to breed these offspring in order to save having me buying any more fish in the future (to a certain extent).

Example of a Gendler 1

Gendler Example 2

 

Gendler Example 3

I should say at this point that I'm not the first person in the world to try this, and I wont be the last, however, Gendlers are points of major controversy. Guppy and Endler purists want to keep the strains clean without any interbreeding, I can see their points but at the end of the day, the Guppy is being so overbred  and inbred these days, hybridisation may be the only way to prolong the life of the species. 

Right now, I still have all the parts sitting in the box and shall start taking pictures tommorow when I set it all up. I'm aiming for a total cost of £20 and then sell any youngens for about £1 each with instructions to avoid breeding at any cost as it would then be inbreeding and we'd be back to square one.

Any questions? Give me a shout.

- C Manning