Breeding in a fry-only tank

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Andy fischer

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i am thinking of cutting bottoms off a plastic breeder. Place it in the 10 gallon fry-only tank. Breed in the breeder and let the fry fall into the tank. Iā€™ve searched for discussion of this practice. Why is this not a reasonable approach?
 
Hi and welcome to the forum?

What sort of fish do you want to breed?
What are you talking about in relation to cutting the bottom off a tank?
 
I want to breed guppies and Mollyā€™s for my grandchildrenā€™s tank. Sorry for the confusion. I meant to say a plastic feeder box. They are equipped as sold with a compartment for the fry. I want to cut that off and just let the fry enter new 10 gallon fry-only tank. In this way, the fish would be less stressed as they would be acclimated to the tank and I would lose few fry.
 
Breeder box not feeder box placed into fry-0nly tank. Just drop them into there new environment.
 
Don't waste your time doing that. Just put a lot of plants in the tank and feed the adults 3 times a day. If the adults are well fed and there are lots of hiding places, the babies are usually ignored by the big fish in the tank.

The best plant is Water Sprite (Ceratopteris thalictroides/ cornuta). It floats on the surface but can also be grown in the substrate.

The babies hide among the plants and you can scoop them out with a plastic container and put them in a breeding net.
 
Are you intending to place the mother in a small box with holes in the bottom so that when the fry are born they will fall though into the tank? If that is what you mean, you need to be aware that placing the mother in these tiny boxes is extremely stressful for the mother; and that moving a very pregnant fish can kill the fry and cause internal damage to the mother.

Colin's method is by far the safest and least cruel for the mother.
 
Lets talk about a more relevant issue here, livebearer math. These fish will spawn about every 30 days, the females can store the male's sperm, so the ladies cab spawn for months without need a male. Next, most livebearers reach spawning age.size fairly fast. So in a matter of months there can be 100s of babies.

In short order one can be overrun with fish, where will they go? With luck some predation should help control population a bit. But kids generally are not happy seeing baby fish get eaten.

Many people will tell you that female livebearers are born pregnant :D

Baby livebearers can eat small foods. Get a grow tank and just net the fry and put them in it.

I used to breed Montezuma swordtails. They have a rep as voracious fry eaters. My experience was the adults were not the biggest threat. What did the damage was the prior generation that was born and soon got big enough to eat their baby brothers and sisters. The more spawns I got, the fewer fry I seemed to have getting bigger.
 
Thank you all. Very useful to me. Happy to get back into the hobby after 35 years out. Will get back into African siclids once I get a bigger tank. Oh so pretty.
 
Don't waste your time doing that. Just put a lot of plants in the tank and feed the adults 3 times a day. If the adults are well fed and there are lots of hiding places, the babies are usually ignored by the big fish in the tank.
I agree. If you just want some fish for the grandchildren losing a few (or even most) is no bad thing. Mollies and Guppies can produce over 100 fry in a single spawning - and as @TwoTankAmin points out that won't be the end of it.

When I kept livebearers I never made any effort to "save" any fry. I still had to make regular trips to the LFS with buckets full of fish I had no space for.
 

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