So finally, the thing that I was able to do on the weekend was I went to a guppy show.
And if anybody doesn’t know what that is, just think of a dog show, but for fish and specifically for guppies.
Me and my family have always been into showing animals. We never did dogs.
We did pigeons and rabbits, and so it’s kind of been something fun that I’ve always done with my dad.
And this last weekend, we’ve been part of the Utah Guppy Club for a long time, wanting to put some fish in the local show since we joined, but for various reasons, we’ve never been able to. Either our fish weren’t big enough or we were out of town or whatever.
And it was really fun. So we got the opportunity to actually show some fish and spent the whole day there doing that, which was super fun.
We’ve been part of the club for a while and wanting to do it. That was nice. So my dad entered in some green deltas, half black and American strains.
And he took first place in the novice division. This is our first time showing guppies, so we got to enter the novice division.
So we didn’t have to compete against guys. I’ve been breeding Guppies for, like, 30 years. Specifically for shows, which was nice.
And then I entered a Swordtail guppy. After entering my swordtail guppy I found out that my guppies are extremely small and need to breed them to be bigger.
Because 1 of the biggest things with showing guppies is that a lot of the point value system for how they’re judged based on how big they are.
I know lots of people nowadays are wanting nano tanks and small fish that can fit like a 2 gallon tank. Or fit a lot of them in a 10 gallon tank, but with show guppies, the whole goal is to make it as big as possible, and then as pretty as possible. Size first looks second.
So even though my guppy was super small. I was the only novice that submitted a swordtail guppy, So I won the whole section also for novice swordtail guppies.
I did find out that If ever want to compete with the big boys I gotta get my fish a lot bigger. And so I’ll probably be out looking for some bigger fish to breed into mine to make them bigger.
It was still super fun. We got to be observers for the show, which is kind of an interesting concept.
So, obviously, with any type of show for any animal, whether it’s fish or dogs or anything yet you, like, certified that you are knowledgeable about the requirements or the ideal look of that fish.
And so with that, the part of the training is you have to observe so many fish being judged before you can start the certification process.
You become a junior judge and then an actual judge And so we started that process, which is fun. I don’t know if I’ll ever judge but it was fun.
The best part was we got to hear the judges talk about and bicker about which fish looks better and why this one’s better, and why that one’s not.
It taught us so much about how the point system works. Which was awesome.
This was probably the most useful part of the show and helped us learn so much about how to improve our fish. But that was a super unique experience.
I haven’t gone to a show of any kind of animal with my dad for a really long time. That was super special in that aspect.
The next day, they had a fish auction. This helps fund the club and future shows. Most people enter their fish from the show in the auction because many of the people showing fish are from out of town and don’t want to spend the money to ship their fish back
This is also a great way for experienced and new guppy breeders to get new bloodlines in their fish rooms.
We didn’t get to stay and do that, which was pretty disappointing because one of my favorite things is to go to a fish auction because I have really, really bad self control when it comes to fish, and I can’t help but buy fish.
So maybe it was a good thing we couldn’t stay.
We definitely enjoyed the show and seeing some of all of the cool colors and finding out why certain colors are called. Or how the specific guppy colors or strains came from. There were a few seminars that were really cool.
There was one that was given by a veterinarian about how to diagnose sick fish. What illnesses do they have and how to treat them.
Another was on how to breed fish to make them look how you want them to.
Brian Chin (one of the biggest and most experienced green guppy breeders in the USA) gave this seminar and explained how delta tail guppies were made. This is the big huge tail you see on most guppy fish.
But he explained that delta tails are ultimately just line bred double swordtails. Delta tail guppies have a sword on the bottom and on the top.
And so a delta tail is just those 2 swords over time were bred to the point where they filled in the space between the swords until you got that delta tail.
And so one of the concepts is you want to make sure that you’re selecting fish that have really long original swords so that the rest of the tail can fill in and have a nice pretty big tail.
I didn’t know that’s where the delta tail originated from. So it was cool to learn about how delta tails were created.
So even if you’re not going to show fish I would definitely suggest going to a guppy show. It’s way fun regardless of how serious you are about fish or showing guppies, it’s just a fun environment to be around.
