Fern Cunningham, age.ll, of Delmar, for the question: _
Why do mother yuppies eat their young?
When we first hear it, this ghastly cannibalism is shocking news. If we have pet guppies, we may want to throw the little horrors down a drain. For it is quite true that Mamma Guppy will sometimes devour her own children. This is even more shocking for she is one of the rare fishes who give birth to live babies. Somehow it seems less shocking to learn¬that any fish will eat all kinds of eggs floating in the water ihcluding their own.
But let's remember that a fish has very little brain and hence Mamma Guppy is very stupid. The little creature does not know what she is doing Her most important fob in .life is to find enough to eat and her favorite food is meat. In the wild, she feeds on all kinds of wriggly water creatures. When born, her babies are also wriggly water creatures.
Most experts believe that Mrs. Guppy devours her young simply because they look good t o eat. A few suggest that this springs from a mistaken feeling of motherly affection. Andy thinks that this cannot be true, for the little fish is not capable of such feelings. What's more, older guppies, both male and female, will devour the little ones who happen to be around.
There is another fact which tends to support the theory that the mother guppy is merely hungry. Guppy breeders tell us that if the little mother is well fed really stuffed with food she is less likely to eat her children.
Guppies are fascinating pets to watch and easy to keep„ They are natives of the northern shoreline of South America Venezuela, British Guiana, Trinidad and the Barbados. In the wild, most of them are little silvery fishes, less than two inches long.
Breeders have produced all kinds of fancy guppy strains and some of these rival the gaudiest of butterflies. As a rule, however, the females are plain silvery grey, occasional white or gold. The male in captivity finally makes up for his smaller size, For it is~only the males of these fancy guppy breeds who show their glowing colors.
If you want to keep these pretty creatures, it is best to start out by buying a book. For the care and feeding of guppies is full of tricks and pitfalls. You can soon learn how it is done and after that you need spend only a short time keeping your pets comfortable.
There are all kinds of methods for saving the baby guppies from their hungry mothers. Some breeders use traps which they lower into the water. The holes they contain are too small for a grown guppy to wriggle through, but large enough for the babies to wriggle to safety, Many breeders use only weeds. If the babies are born in certain feathery water weeds, they can hide from their hungry parents, Some put wads of prepared Spanish moss into the water and the babies hide in the tangles. In any case, the youngsters are given a tank of their own as soon as the whole brood is born and there may be 120 of them at a time