Livebearers: Breeding and rearing guide.

FishForums.net Pet of the Month
🐶 POTM Poll is Open! 🦎 Click here to Vote! 🐰

William

TFF Founder
Retired Moderator ⚒️
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
7,497
Reaction score
4
Location
London!
Most people's first fish to breed are livebearers simply because it's almost impossible to not get them to breed! To get started with whatever fish you decide you'll usualy need a pair or a trio -1 male 2 females or 1 male 1 female (identification techniques later on). Livebearers- mollies, guppies and platies, do not lay eggs like most fish but instead give birth to young free swimming fry. When you get most female livebearers they are pregnant and should give birth to babies every 3 or 4 weeks.

If you want to have a few baby livebearers, get two or three fat female you can tell they are females due to their fan shaped anal fin unlike the males elongated gonopodium- See here for a guide to ddetermining the gender.

Be sure to keep your aquarium clean and change about 25% of the water in your aquarium at least once a week. Feed your livebearers plenty of floating flakes and some live food as well to supplement their diet and give them larger and more healthy offspring. As always remove any uneaten food after 5 minutes.

When your female livebearer is big and looks like she’s about to (burst) release babies there is the option to move her into another aquarium or put her into a net breeder protect her babies when they spawn, it should be noted that the mother for approximately 12 hours after releasing the babies has a surge of a hormone which results in her not being hungry. While this is an option the difficulty is that often I have found that if I move the female too early she will abort the pregnancy due to stress, the same may happen if you buy a heavily pregnant fish from the fish store and yet you find no babies in your tank. For this reason I have found - perhaps because fry especially from livebears are no longer unusual or special I just leave the adults in my community tank which has a planted corner. I have found that even without removing the babies into an external aquarium/net breeder you'll get some babies which make it to adult hood... unless you've got some really evil fish in there! I have also found the use of large marbles on the floor of the tank to be superb as hiding places for the fry, even so if I wish to save some interesting colour fry or need more fry then I follow the following procedure.

Aid the Fry: A net breeder is a must if you wish to save large numbers of fry. Simply place it in a corner of the tank when one of the females has already spawned or place the female in it just before she spawns. Either way ensure the fry are the only fish inside the net. As a rough guide, a young female platy/guppy/molly usually releases 12 to 30 babies in her first batch of young. In comparison a large molly may be able to release up to 100 babies! I highly recommend you to purchase a "net breeder" made out of mesh rather than a plastic one as I have heard too many bad reports about them and my net breeder has worked flawlessly for me (plastic ones babies escape/get eaten or trapped!) The net breeder has a frame made of plastic and is covered in fine net to separate the fry inside the net from the larger fish swimming around in the aquarium.

A few of common problems people have is that they have bought store bought fish which the store said were pregnant and yet you don't have any babies. If this is the case, and you are sure that you have both females and males in your tank preferably at the ratio 2 females to 1 male livebearer then you can do a couple of things to enhance your chances.
1) Change 20% of the water in the aquarium each day replacing it with dechlorinated water which is as close to the temperature already in the water as possible, remembering any differences will result in stress to the fish and more chance of your livebearer aborting her pregnancy.
2) Supplement your livebearers diet with vegetables which form an integral part of a livebearers diet in the wild I would reccomend blanched zucchini (courgette) or cucumber, flakes are only so good and try to add to the meaty part of your livebearers diet with blood worms or adult brine shrimp.
3) This should probably be number 1 as it is the most important... Patience! there is nothing to stop your livebearer giving birth and the odds are stacked in her favour if you have followed the procedures already mentioned.

Now you've got the fry leave them in the net breeder or their own aquarium, feed them little and often - 3 times a day for maximum growth- with finely crushed flake food (as fine as you can crush it, use your fingers and rub them together really grinding it up very finely because any large bits will remain uneaten and will rot polluting your tank). When your baby fish have grown to about one inch which will take between two and four months you can release them back into the aquarium with their parents or this is also the size when fish stores will be willing to buy livebearer fry off you. Growth will vary on quality of food and also of tank temperature, 79 degrees fahrenheit is about the maximum recommended and at this temperature the fry will grow faster than at a lower temperature. Not recommended if you have other fish in the tank though and step up the temperature increase slowly.
If everything goes well you should have lots of fry
 
Well fingers crossed, if anyone has anything to add post in this thread and it'll be ammended into this guppy / platy / swordtail and molly article (as well as the other livebearers) breeding article just because they are not photographic stars the same rules for breeding apply. Theres no doubt some things I have missed but that is a good general breeding advice for livebearers and has seen my raise hundreds , maybe thousands of the little fellas :)
 
Well written, William. :) Looks to me like it covers all the basics.

By the way, if you don't want to remove the female from the tank but want to give the fry a chance anyway, I've found that another good hiding place for the babies is java moss (Vesicularia dubyana).
 
well recently my oldest fry which were 2 and half months old truend into males an females so platys trun into teenager slash young adults when they are 2.5 months old!!! :D :thumbs:
 
Agreed. Nicely done. That answered most of my questions with detail.
 
Hi, can any1 help me with my problem!?
I have benn keeping fish for about 2 years, I have one tank that i keep Swordtails in, The tank only has Swordtails and no other fish in it. So why r they not breeding? There is plenty of weed for the young fry to hide in and a rock with holes in it. In the tank there are 3 male Swordtails and 7 female swordtails. Can you think of any reason why there not breeding? I've checked the water and that's fine. Please please help me! :unsure:
 
Hi William - I'm a Newbie - your article is great and really helpful. THANKS A BUNCH!! :D
 
well god of the fish try bumpin the temp up slightly and that might help,

Ive got 11 mollie fry and there about 2 months and there all females, very odd i thought
 
How big are these molly fry, you may find that some of the "females" develop into males later on ;)
 
Very good article.
I read this awhile back, and I followed the directions, but my momma died before giving birth. The girl at the pet store told me she's probably been breeding for awhile and since I had a too many males to females, she probably died from overbreeding. So I went to the pet store to buy some more females. It was really cool because when I got the new females home my son noticed 2 little fry in the bag. I figured out which one it was and put her and the fry in the net breeder and ended up with 15 live fry. it's been a week and I still have 15!! Yippee!!!
 
Very good artical.

One thing i have also found out is that you can never really tell when they are going to give birth except for the larger femles. several of my females dont even look like they are going to brop and then the next day the tank is full. However they are always small spawns of around 20.

Also the surge of hormones doesnt always seem to work as I have had a few females that as soon as the two come out at once she quickly eats one then trys for the other. Maybe thats why they get born in twos. so 1 gets away.
But not all the guppies are canibals. i have found that some of the females are protective.

Just to add to the point about having a good water for changing out. In my early days when i was impatent i would change the water out on the tank before it was ready to be introduced. this caused my fry to get deformed. what happens is that due to the water causing them stress the fry build up antibodies to protect it for an on coming illness. because there is no illness the antibodies move into the muscle and bones of the fish causing irregular groath. what you will find is you fry will get arched backs, deformed fins and their mouths will start to rot away.
This will also happen if you use to much antibiotic treaments in your tank. so if you have a mixed tank or fry and adults just remember that you can lose all you fry beacuse you add to many drops.
 
this morning my females were still fat and square but the gravid spot liked lighter in color than last night. Not red, maybe light brown? Gonna go home and check. Does the gravid spot change right before drop? why? Embrionic sac or something like that? My females are fatter and squarer that the one in the pic and then some pick of pregnant females are way huge! I* guess I'll know when she drops, but we gotta talk about something right? Patience is a virtue.

Thanks,

Keith
 

Most reactions

trending

Staff online

Back
Top