Don't Look Down On Them! The Wild Guppy

  Alright! This here is my favorite fish ever. The Wild Guppy. I'm not very sure what it's called

scientifically. Some sites call it poecilia reticulata, others call it poecilia vivipara. I think poecilia

vivipara should be just just about right though. Poepcilia reitculata  refers to the commercialized

variety of guppy which is more colorful and commercialized. Here in Malaysia, we just call them the

Longkang Fish, literally translated it means the Drain Fish, because you can find millions of them in

nearly any drain here!

  Once again, I wish I had a camera as a kid because I kept hundreds of these lil guys. I remember

how my dad and us kids ( at that time just me and my younger brother) , would wake up early on

Saturday mornings and cycle out in search of these fish. All you had to do was find a drain that had

em! Then jump in and catch em with a net.

  Unlike the commercial guppies that you find in pet shops near you, these guys were relatively

 plainer and their tails and fins are much smaller. They aren't fully colored  but their bodies tend to be

translucent with dots or streaks of color. Red, blue, green, yellow and any other color you can think

of. The males are smaller and are more colorful than females. Some of them have color in their tails

and fins. Some are just spotted or streaked on their bodies. This is a picture of what a typical male

wild guppy looks like

Usually this is what a wild guppy looks like. If you catch the ones in the wild, there may be even less

 colors on it's body

This lucky guy has color on his dorsal fin and body but his tail is translucent. I think this one has

undergone selective breeding, thus is more colorful than the usual variety

  This one here is a female. Females are void of color and can grow larger than males. It's very

 rare to find females with color

  The fun part about these wild guppies are that they are super easy to keep. They are very resilient,

they can survive in even the murkiest kind or water, able to withstand strong currents ( I even found

these guys at a waterfall once, and they were real beauties!), and they breed nonstop! They usually

live a year or two, sometimes even a lil longer.

  They are live bearers, meaning that they give birth to live young but you have to watch them as

usually the mother or another male will gobble them up as soon as they are born. They are really tiny

and are born with egg sacs so you don't have to feed them till the egg sacs disappear.I usually

separate the parents as soon as the fry are born or I know they will become fish snacks to the

hungry parents. Cannibals!

That tiny thing there is the wild guppies baby. Cute eh? I'm not sure what the record number of babies

 are but usually my females would give birth to 10 or 20 plus fry. They just popped out one by one!

  Nowadays, I don't have the pleasure of keeping wild guppies anymore because I'm already in

college and my dorm doesn't allow pets. Not that it stops me anyway! I have a betta to keep me

company now. It does make me sad though to see the natural habitat of these fishes being cemented

up and destroyed. I hope that they keep breeding because it would be a shame if they became hard to

find. I wish I had pics of my own fish which I specially bred in the past but I guess what's gone is

gone