Mean Platy

[Debo]

Hi,
I have had my tank for 3 months and I am noticing that my male platy is a real pain in the neck with the females, actually nipping them etc if they won't let him get near them. I keep telling my husband that it's a typical guy thing-great dinner of brine shrimp and he gets all fired up and wants to have some fun. I want to get him out of the tank, but my husband says to let him go at them. Is this normal behavior? He bugs them till they are exhausted. I have 1 male and 3 females. he may just be oversexed?
Deb

 

[William]

1 male to 3 females is a good ratio to have maybe you've just got an overenergetic one He may be trying to "nip the females" in order to get them to release the fry - is he head butting them in the middle? If so he's hoping for a free snack - gruesome but true!

Welcome to the forum I personally wouldn't worry too much about your platy at all, has he just started being more aggressive recently though?

 

[Debo]

What do you mean nip the female to release the fry? How do you know thry are pregnant? I have seen mine get real close, side by side and the male lock onto the female with his anal fin. But I have never seen any babies. Do they swell before they breed?

 

[MountGuppy]

you should see a dark or so called gravid spot right on her belly

 

[Sal]

I know what you mean. When we set up our new tank we bought 2 platys, one male, one female. Everything that I'd heard about platys suggested that they were not agressive fish but the male had soon bullied the female so much that she hid under the filter all the time and looked really miserable. If she tried to come out the male would attack her, even at dinner time. So we bought another female but the situation didn't change. In the end we decided to get rid of the male and the new female and now she is much happier and plays with the other fish. However, we now have at least 6 platy fry in the tank so maybe williams philosophy is true.

When we took the male back to the LFS they put him in a tank full of jumbo platys, he wasn't looking so agressive then -

 

[KimmyFishy89]

...is he head butting them in the middle? If so he's hoping for a free snack - gruesome but true!

I have seen my male do that occasionally to my female. But he isn't really violent to her.

 

[pondfreak4365]

I have a couple of molly male that behave that way too. I do place them in a different tank just to give the female a break I just get tired of seeing him pester the females.

 

[MAM]

i have a mean platy too. so much so that i renamed him Capone. i originally had two males (was new, didn't know better), and for the first month, they got along great. then capone started pestering the other one to the point i thought he'd keel over from stress. so i bought them a girlfriend (will get another soon), but that hasn't helped. capone doesn't pay any attention to the girl (maybe she's not colorful enough for him), and still pesters and chases the other male (poor thing has taken to hiding in the plants and in the cave most of the time). i have to keep the lights off most of the time because he does most of his bullying when the lights are on in the tank. hope yours gets its out of his system soon.

 

[bigfish]

I have a mean male platy too, he pesters the same female that i bought with him as they were out of the same tank, does nothing but bully her. Not funny when she is heavily pregnant and can hardly move around. I will be removing her shortly to let her rest.

Must be a male thing or something in the water. lol