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One thing I love about guppies is how easy and fun they are to breed. Guppies breed year round, and need no special treatment to reproduce. You pretty much just have to put a male and female together and they will have babies. The only real challenge is to separate the female when she gets close to giving birth, and make sure she doesn't eat her babies once they are born.

I put her in a small mesh pen along with the other baby fish in my 55 gallon tank. The mollies were big enough that I wasn't worried about her eating them, and I had plenty of plants in the pen so they could all take cover from her if they needed to. A couple days later, she was thinner and there were 4 or 5 baby guppies swimming around in the tank. I say 4 or 5 because that's all that were out in the open. Who knows how many are hiding in the plants. They look just like the ones in the picture below.

I'll leave them in the pen until I finish setting up my 10 gallon nursery tank for them. I'm curious to see how they turn out because their mother is beautiful. She has a huge tail with very bright red-orange coloration. She has a slightly bluish iridescence to her dorsal fin, which could lend some blue genes to her offspring. Any of the males would look good blended with her and I had yellow, red, orange, and blue males in the tank when she got pregnant.

I'm hoping to breed in some of my new purple and green guppies into the gene pool to see what kinds of crazy colorations I get. Unlike many animals, when guppies of 2 colors breed, you usually get a good mixture and blending of the two. They won't show color for a couple months, but I'll be happy to see them when they do.  

      Fancy-tailed guppies usually come in a few fairly basic color groups, the most common of which are predominantly green, blue, or red. There are certain patterns and traits that are typical among each color group, so when you breed guppies of different colors, you might end up mixing both colors and patterns.

     What's also great about breeding fancy-tailed guppies is that they can cross-breed with regular feeder guppies and other guppy varieties. Cross-breeding can result in all kinds of different body-types, color schemes, and patterns. For example, crosses between regular and fancy-tailed guppies often have fancy-tailed guppy colors and patterns accented by the randomly-spaced, brightly colored spots common among regular guppies, and their bodies have a stream-lined yet sleek compromise between the very different body types common to each variety. As an added bonus, there's always plenty of room for cool mutations when you cross-breed your guppies.

I love the way guppies blend when you mix them. With most species when you cross breed them, their offspring resembles either one parent or the other. Guppies tend to blend both colors into new color varieties. Almost every guppy from any given litter will be totally unique in its features. They even have a whole palate of fin shapes and body forms to range between.

Mixing in some common guppies really makes the genes go crazy because common guppies are basically a mix of all colors. While they tend to dwarf your gene pool and make all their offspring much smaller, they can cause some really impressive effects if bred properly. I've seen some of these mixes at a pet store with stained glass patterns of iridescence on their sides and split swallow shaped tails.

I have a batch of about 5 baby guppies from a female with an extremely bright red-orange tail. I have no idea what other colors are mixed into their genes so it will be a total surprise to find out what they look like when their color comes in. I'll be sure to post some pictures when I can.