Help! I'm A New Guppy Mummy.

[sarah1980]

Hello there!

I'm new to guppies and am after some advice. I've read through lots of the posts already (which I thought might me useful) and am a little confused. I decided I'd register as a user and see if I could find a little more clarification.

Basically, I've got a couple of pregnant females - I think!? They are both very large in comparison to my other females. One has a huge black gravid spot. The other (who is much fatter than the first) has a huge pink/fleshy coloured gravid spot. Would they both be pregnant or just the fish with the black spot?

I don't know what to do. Both are hanging around the heater. The "pink spot" guppy is also being chased by one of the males in the tank.

Can someone shed some like?

I look forward to your replies. Thanks in advance.

~ Sarah from Australia ~

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum Sarah.
5teady has a fairly comprehensive post that is stickied and shows, with pictures, what various stages of a livebearer pregnancy looks like. My personal experience is that I must ignore the gravid spot color and the size of my females. Instead I try to judge their shape. A guppy that is very close to a fry drop will almost always have a shape that looks almost like she swallowed one of those rounded dice that they use in kid's games. Her belly will have a squarish look to it rather than a smooth round shape. A very large fish may be nothing more than eating well. A dark gravid spot does not work for me because I can never really say what I am seeing through a semi-transparent fish. In many of the fish that I breed, there is no gravid spot visible because of the fish's skin color anyway.

The square shape that I am talking about can be easily seen on this girl. She was 3 days ahead of her next drop when the picture was taken. Of course a guppy never gets this big but the shape will get similar right before they deliver.

As you can tell, there is no way to judge based on her gravid spot. Her white skin in that area makes it not visible.

 

[Platygirl11]

Gravid spots do not show up often in brighter colored fish.
ON my pregnant female, I didn't see a gravid spot at all...

 

[sarah1980]

Thanks guys! I moved the fattest guppy into the breeding net thingo overnight...and guess what? She had babies! There's only five though. I'm not sure if she ate some. One one of the fry escaped to the "enclosed" section underneath. The rest were swimming around with their mum. Silly babies!

Interestingly, it was the pink spot guppy who had her babies. AND I can now see some little black spot in her spot - so I'm thinking there are still some little ones in there.