More Fry For Me...

[Harlequins]

Well yesterday my orange tailed guppy dropped yesterday,managed to find & catch 27 fry

Then today my blue platy dropped 61 fry

My blue guppy is due too...

Here's the platy fry from today

 

[fry_forever!]

Awesome! Lucky you! My females never dropped that many fry! The most I got at once was like, 40 or something. The norm for me was around 5. lol

Congrats!

 

[OldMan47]

It is definetely time to do one of two things Harlequins. Either get a large grow out tank or stop saving all the fry. You can't afford to save them all unless you have room for them to grow big enough to sell.

 

[Harlequins]

Thanks all

Oldman- i try not to save the fry,but i'm too soft ,i have decided to sell some of my livebearers to cut down on the amount of fry being dropped.i have 6 guppies & 5 platies,i thought i'd sell half of these,i love fry but its gone to the extreme now

 

[dunchp]

Can I direct you to an article written by Jim Langhammer. He is kind of a livebearer God and a man definitely worth listening to.

http/www.aquaria.info/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=304

Although one way of reducing the number of fry you have to deal with is to get rid of a few adults, it is really missing the point. The thing with cultivated livebearers is that they tend to drop throwbacks and a percentage of fry which do not have the qualities you are looking for, the only way to deal with this is to select the best and cull the rest of your fry.

Size is a good example, if you want bigger sized fish (which many cultivated species have been bred for), you need to be careful that you don't keep all of your fry as the smaller ones sneak copulating with your adult fish and you may end up with a tank of smaller fish; also if you don't cull then you will likely end up with a whole load of fish which do not look like their parents and are just a mixture of throwbacks and dull siblings.

Therefore the answer may be keeping the same number of adults, saving the fry and picking out the best to raise after say 6 weeks and getting rid of the rest.

Of course I would never dream to preach to you and even the attached article says that you should define your goals. If you judge success by the number of fry rather than the quality then that is fine, there is no shame in that.

 

[OldMan47]

That is a very informative article by Jim Langhammer. I think I may have stumbled across it before but it is always worth rereading. I look forward to seeing him again at this year's ALA convention. He probably has no clue who I am but is a well respected member there.

 

[dunchp]

Yup, I reread it quite often, it is the best article I have read on the subject.

 

[Harlequins]

Thanks for the article very interesting read.

 

[clay]

Well yesterday my orange tailed guppy dropped yesterday,managed to find & catch 27 fry

Then today my blue platy dropped 61 fry

My blue guppy is due too...

Here's the platy fry from today

nice drop

 

[FBTgirl2]

Awesome drop

 

[Harlequins]

Thanks