Setting Up a Guppy Hatchery

Aquarium owners keep guppies as pets due to their small size and range of bright colors. Female guppies are prolific breeders that retain eggs inside themselves and give birth to live offspring. Since guppies require little space, you can design a guppy hatchery to expand your aquarium or create a side business that costs less to set up than a hatchery for larger fish.

  1. Tanks

    • Start out with 1 gallon tanks when setting up your operations, because a gallon tank will hold roughly 25 adult guppies and large batches of fry. You will need at least five tanks to start, but can expand the capacity and number of tanks as you expand your hatchery. You need two tanks for non-bred males and females, a breeding tank, a tank for pregnant females and a tank for each batch of young guppies.

    Accessories

    • Buy all necessary accessories for your tanks, including filtration units, extra filters, aerators, aquarium pebbles, stand and lighting. Guppies eat any edible vegetable and animal matter they can fit in their mouths, including insect larvae and mashed vegetables, but small breed fish flakes provide the most nutritious diet. Guppies have large energy requirements and small stomachs, requiring you to feed them three times a day.

    Breeding

    • Purchase high-quality male and female guppies from multiple hatcheries as breeding stock, because inbreeding occurs if you repeatedly breed females with closely related males. You must keep guppies separated by gender, because they breed frequently. Female guppies can retain sperm for up to a year and do not need to mate repeatedly. You must use aquarium heaters to keep the water lukewarm to encourage them to breed. Put the male and female with the desired coloring together in the same tank for a day to breed them.

    Time Frame

    • Keep a schedule of matings and births, because a guppy hatchery will fail due to cannibalism or inbreeding if you do not move guppies to appropriate tanks within the right time window. Breed multiple females with males at the same time, and the females should give birth in about a month within days of one another. You will have to remove the females from the tank to prevent them from eating their offspring. After three months, fry reach maturity and can mate with their siblings, so you must add them by gender to the tanks that contain your non-bred males and females.