guppies, how many tanks to have a solid stock.

[Goonie]

So I have been raising my own guppies and supplementing with ghost shrimp.

I would like to get to the point where I could pull out a few guppies a week for my predator tank (leaf fish, butterfly fish, pollys and a pike characin)

How many tanks would I need running to sustain this, what are some other options of easy to breed food for these fish, I was thinking of maybe convicts or shellys as I hear they breed quickly as well.
How would white clouds work(appealing because I could run that tank w/o a heater in my basement which is normally 68 degrees.

I have mostly display tanks atm, but will be setting up a breeding room in the coming weeks.
These will be the tanks I have to work with for breeding
6x40bs, 10x 10g 2x 20l I may add a few more 20ls or 40 Bs and a 75 as well but that would be in a second stage of tanks.
I can not heat all of the tanks currently as I don't believe I will have enough outlets.
They will all run of box and sponge filters.

I am open to drilling them to run them on a central system where I can heat a large sump of some sort, but would prefer that they all remain independent.

I have toyed with the idea of scuds for the 10gs but with the fish being the size they are I think they would be ignored, though I may do a couple tanks of them for my kribs.
I have also toyed with the idea of running a few cherry shrimp tanks for food.

Any input would be welcome.

The adult African tank with my huge congo tetras rip through about 100 ghost shrimp a week. if that gives you any idea on how much food they go through. (and yes I do feed pellets and massivor/shimp tablets as well as silver sides and cut market shrimp so I do not depend on live food, I only have two fish that are still on live only, but I'm working on it.

 

[Becca]

Dude - I could've given you a trio of Cryptoheros cutteri (and some of their offspring). I meant to give you a thing of frozen silversides, too. I forgot. Not that the pike does anything but look at them with disgust, but your other fish might've liked them.

White clouds spawn and have fry survive pretty easily, particularly if you've got a lot of moss in the tank and are using a sponge filter. Don't use a power filter with them. You could divide a 40B into 3 sections using 2" thick foam sheets (ebay has some that are the perfect size for this) and just move the white clouds around. They will occasionally eat their own eggs, but they pretty much leave fry be. If you leave them in one side for a week, move them to the next for a week, and then to the next, by the time you're back to the first, the fry should be big enough that the parents will leave them alone. Also, I have mass quantities of those growing out back.

I also have scuds if you wanted a bag of substrate with them as a starter. Just don't let them get into any shrimp breeding tanks (if you have them) because they will rob eggs right off a shrimp. They're really good for getting rid of organic waste in filters, substrate, and sumps.