Travelling With Guppies

I am back from my trip to England, which included a stop in Sheffield to attend a guppy show.

The hosts were very hospitable. I received a pair of red guppy shirts and Malcolm Clarke took me to lunch.It was an enjoyable few hours spent with guppy friends.

One special guppy friend came over from Paris, Ronan Boutot. We have shared a fascination for the color biology of guppies for more than ten years, so it was great to meet him in person. I gave him some blond See-thrus and he gave me some European Blaus in return. These are the first See-thrus in Europe as far as I know. If you want to get your hands on European See-thru guppies contact me through this site and I will pass on your contact information to Ronan.

I have wanted to lay my hands on European Blaus for some years. I believe the gene is the only one of all the guppy color genes that I have been missing. Despite the fact it has a similar name to Asian Blau (Blau is German for "blue"), I do not think the two mutations are related. The European Blau is normal colored when heterozygous, but loses both red and yellow color when homozygous. Also the blue appears to be a very dull and dark color, not metallic blue as in the case of the Asian Blau. I am going to have fun with this mutation!

I learned a lot about contemporary travel with guppies! Since liquids are now banned on domestic or international flights around the world, taking a few guppies to a show or a friend has become a lot more difficult. Here is my experience.

I traveled to Europe with soft not hard shell luggage. This meant that I would have to protect the guppies in the checked baggage. I chose to use two small thermos bottles to transport the two trios I took. I transported young guppies, dividing them between the two thermos bottles. I also packed a fish net, some coral sand, a small portable pump, and two plastic containers. I would not be attending the guppy show and making the guppy exchange for a week after departure so I would in effect keep my guppies alive in the plastic containers for the week ahead. I maintain the pH in my tanks using coral sand, so my plan was to condition water in one plastic container while my guppies lived in the second container. Every day I would change the water.

The guppies survived the airplane trip fine. I poured them into one of the plastic containers and filled the second one with water and coral sand. I plugged the pump in. In about ten minutes I discovered my first mistake. The pump suddenly stopped. I forgot that the voltage is Europe is different from that in North America. In the garbage can with the pump. As it turned out the plastic dishes were shallow enough and I changed the water often enough such that I did not need the pump.

Then I made my second mistake. The clue should have been how soapy I got in the shower. Apparently the water is really hard in the area of England I was visiting, which meant that the B&B place I was staying at was using water softener. This fact did not click in until the fourth day after my arrival, at which point my fry were very stressed from exposure to the chemicals used in water softeners. But  they survived. In subsequent lodgings  I used bottled water until I could determine if water softener was used to treat the water.

Now for the third mistake. Transferring the fish from one plastic container to another in the hotel sink resulted in a guppy that jumped. It fell down the drain hole. Next time close the drain hole!

I neatly packaged up the guppies for transfer to Ronan, using plastic shipping bags. But I was in for a big surprise when Ronan presented his Blaus to me. They were in really small breather bags. The image associated with this post shows what they look like and how they work. Essentially the idea is that the plastic used in the bag allows the transfer of gases (Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide) between the bag and the air. You can read about them here: Kordon Breathing Bags.

Ronan joked that the bags had been transported in his shoes. Indeed they were very small and had no air in the bag. And the less water you put in the bag the better, as it makes it easier for air exchange the shorter the distance between the fish and the side of the bag. Ronan had the bags wrapped loosely in paper towel, to prevent the bags from touching each other, which acts a barrier to air exchange. I plan to use the bags in a shipment of fish I am going to send off later this month. You still have to provide air around the bags so that the guppies can breathe, but I can see the bags will greatly reduce the volume and weight of a large shipment, reducing the cost. Although Ronan gave me bags to cart my guppies back to Canada, I ended up using thermos bottles because of the hard shell of the bottle and the insulation against the cold provided by the thermos lining.

The European Blaus Ronan kindly gave me were fine in the remaining two weeks of my trip, although I am sure hotel cleaning staff must have wondered why I was bringing my pet fish along with my trip. In the B&B establishments the proprietors were highly amused or interested in my hobby once I explained why I was setting up my portable aquariums. One last proviso. My plastic containers were shallow enough that one of  the Blau males took a flying leap somewhere along my journey, reducing  the count from six to five guppies that survived the trip. I learned to place a piece of paper over the container.

The day after the show I visited Malcolm Clarke in his home in Norfolk in the north of England. He gave me a tour of his fish room where he has over 90 tanks and a water replacement system. As it turns out Malcolm is a national sales manager for the dog food division of an animal feed company and has a background as a butcher. So he knows a thing or two about animal feed. So I trust his judgment about the quality of fish food. The food he uses is JBL Novo Guppy from JBL GmbH & Co., Germany. He observes that it does not make the guppy fat or chesty and he has got excellent longevity from his guppies from its use. I am trying to find a distributor in North America. If you know of one, please comment at the end of this article or contact me through the site's contact page.

Amazing how much I learned on my vacation away from guppies!

When I returned home after an 18 day absence all my guppies were fine, despite the fact their care was put into the hands of a neophyte. Before leaving for my trip I turned down the temperature of the fish room to 70 degrees fahrenheit (21C) to slow their metabolism down and to safeguard their health. I left instructions to only feed the guppies once a day with pellet food very sparingly. I turned over the water in the tanks 100% in the week before I left to reduce organics and toxins in the tanks to zero. I put a clean sponge on one of the filters and cleaned the other. I asked that the fry tanks be lightly siphoned once or twice. No water changes. When I returned all the guppies were healthy although I did note they had not grown very much. My objective had been to just keep them alive and not have the tanks spoil from waste and stagnation. It seemed to work just fine. Here it is three days later and they are all very active and healthy, including my new European Blaus from Ronan.

Thanks to my English guppy friends and Ronan!