So your 20 cents per guppy for a pair (40 cents now) times five would give you a $2.00 pair of guppies. How fancy and color consistent is that pair? Do they breed true? Is the male's delta or veil tail close to an inch long?

    We don't always get what we pay for. In commercial transactions though, it has been my modest experience that if we don't pay for it, we don't get much quality.

    There are guppies and there are guppies. 40 years ago one could pay 4 to 6 dollars for a pretty nice pair of guppies. (The minimum wage was a dollar, stamps were 7 cents, the income of the "average" family was $8,000/ year, you could buy a pretty nice car for $3,000 etc.) The guppies in shops were mostly raised by American breeders. (I sold some of my blue delta pairs for $1-2 cash in the late '60s to a shop in Glendale Hts, IL.)

    The quality and variety of fancy guppies today can be much greater than 40 years ago, but those fish you are alluding to were probably raised in Southeast Asia. A big part of their wholesale price was the shipping half way around the world. Some of them are indeed breathtakingly beautiful.

    But we have to contend with fish which have sometimes been shipped in water with an amazingly high salt content (instead of the minerals guppies really need) and are at risk of being terminally shocked. Then we are at the mercy of wholesalers and retailers who are pressed for space and who may mix the strains. Then we are stuck with a bunch of mutts. They may be beautiful mutts, but mutts they are.

If all we want are some pretty community tank fish, then we are fine. At the risk of sounding kind of snobbish, if we want to breed a really outstanding strain of fancy guppy, we are working with tough odds against us.

Our dog is a mutt. We have no plans to propagate schnoodles. It rescued a dog in need of adoption, brought great joy into our daughter's life and provided the rest of us with a pretty good house dog and companion.