Plans for the breeder tank. Looking for opinions

I bought a 20 gallon long for the specific purpose of well using it for my wild type bettas, but I've decided to repurpose it as my guppy breeder tank.

Since I'll be keeping three different strains, I was looking for a way to... well simplify. This is what I came up with: plastic mesh dividers cutting the tank into 1/4s, then take one of the spaces on the end and divide it again into fry tanks. I got a big multi-way gang valve to help with filtration, as I'll be running sponge filters in each of the sections (with any luck).

The dividers will probably have moss glued to them to kinda help keep everyone separate.

I made a visual aid The red stuff is sponge filtration... for some reason or other that seemed fitting.




The idea is to prevent unwanted cross-breeding. Hopefully you all will have some ideas for improvement as I'm certain there's room for it.

 

How are you holding the mesh to the glass?

In my opinion, this method does not work unless you have glass separators or tight fitting mesh.

Reasons why it does not work. You'll have 400 guppies in 1 month. then 4 months later you'll have 2000

 

Silicone with those little binder thingamabobs. Still can't remember the name of them. Sorry, should have put that in the original post. It'll be similar to the dividers people are always making for their betta tanks.

I have yet to see any fry out of my females, so I don't think the population will explode quite that fast. Plus the guppy strains are fry eaters :/

Anyway, I'll be scooping a bunch of the fry out for culling and such once they start coming in, feeding some to my other fish and hopefully selling others I'll keep them in separate tanks for sexing, and selecting specimens for addition to the neighboring strains (Rio Abre will stay true though <3) That way I can have some control over fry production. I have a shrimp tank set up that will house the males during "off" months.

Edit: another option is to leave the Rio Abres in the tank with the adults and use the spare fry compartment as a sexing area. However this would mix the strains.

 

They make commercial dividers I'm pretty sure they make them for 20 longs too.

 

Those divider sucks. They are held to the glass with 2 pins which leaves HUUGE holes for fry to swim pass.

I've used them and could not tell which fry belongs to who. so they all went into the cull tank.

But silicone on the mesh would work great

As for , I typically have a 5% cull on my batch of fry. But my breeding trio has had 200 fry total already. 1x per month and sometimes its just pop one here and there for a whole month.

 

My platies popped one or three here and there for a month.... then they ate them o.o

I'm hoping I can prevent some of that with the guppies lol. Yay for DIY tank dividers! (I think I'll go with the mesh and silicone simply because it's so easy to do, cheap, and I already have a bunch of the stuff to do it with.)