Pregger Guppy - How Soon?

[Sacred]

Okies so I am pretty new when it comes to fish. I have been looking around all over the place at guides and what to look for to tell when a female guppy is ready to give birth. There are plenty of guides with pictures and diagrams, but I am still not able to judge it correctly yet

I had one guppy, she looked like she was getting ready to drop, she was big, puffed up looking and the black spot area was deep black and large. I thought she was ready. Put her in a fish hatchery that floats in the tank. Nothing seemed to happen, two days nothing was pretty much about to give up, but when I looked again she seemed to have got smaller again. Unless it was some kind of phantom pregenancy or maybe she did drop and had just a small batch and they all got nommed I don't know. But I put her back in the tank now.

Now I have another guppy, she is looking like she is getting close to a possible drop. I took some photos, but they make her look slimmer then it does with the eyes, but it's the best I could get. She seems very lively though, darting about. I will put her back in the tank for now, unless someone says otherwise, looks too early still but she is getting big.

http/i14.photobucket.com/albums/a308/furrybull/DSCF1603.jpg
http/i14.photobucket.com/albums/a308/furrybull/DSCF1608.jpg
http/i14.photobucket.com/albums/a308/furrybull/DSCF1610.jpg

I just want to know how far she is, roughly. Want to try raise some fry. Unless I am there and look just at the right time I am going to miss it

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Also on another note: I don't seem to be having much luck with my guppies. I started off with 2 males and 4 females with my new tank. I always thought guppies were quite hardy. But then I lost both my males a few days later, then one of the females. So a week later I got some more males and some more females from Pets at Home. Four males and four females. But again I lost all but one of the males now, the females are doing better, but down to four now.

Alas the first preggy one I mentioned above that was in the hatchery died a few mins ago. I don't know what happened, it was just sitting about on plants looking doppy and just now it was just being moved about by the water disturbance from the filtering system. It was dead

I do wonder if it was in the hatchery too long, poor thing. So now I am down to four females and this one lone male and I do wonder how he is gonna last, he had a odd looking tail when I got him, was like three tipped, now the top and bottom tips seem to have gone, just got the middle. He still swims about happily but I wonder if it's getting nipped possibly. The two angels I have 'would' be seen as the culprits responsible but I have yet to see them go after any of the fish and they are both small. I have six silver tipped tetras and the males seem to harrass the guppies alot, chasing them about and going for the tails, they seem frisky. I wonder if they are disturbing the guppies too much.

Tank: 60 gallon
Current fish:
6x silver tipped tertas
4x Guppy (1 male 3 females)
4x Black phantoms
2x Angel Fish
1x Pictus catfish

Thanks for looking and awful lot for one post, advice would be much welcomed.

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to our forum Sacred.
Your pictures are able to be posted here using the IMG codes on Photobucket as if they were text. The end result, for your pictures in thwe order you posted them, is this:

As far as predicting the drop date on your female guppies, I would say they are not very close to a drop. I have a thread that can be found using the My Molly's Progress link in my signature area. It takes you through the entire cycle from beginning to end of one of my female mollies from one drop to the next. Every few days I added in pictures and a few comments of what I saw in the pictures. Since guppies and mollies are so similar, the pictures should help you define where exactly your guppies may be. Please note that my molly is one that never shows a "gravid spot" because she has skin that is colored and not transparent. That means that she will never mislead me with the color of the gravid spot. I also make comment about size and shape of the fish's abdomen in that thread because a well fed fish can often look heavy with fry to a beginner. In your pictures, I must conclude that none of the pictures show a very far advanced pregnancy.
Pregnancy is really the wrong word with poeciliids like guppies but the vernacular fits in with what people expect to see in writing. Poeciliids do not provide the kind of pre-natal care that a mammal would do for its offspring. Instead, they provide mainly shelter and maybe a bit of oxygen to the unborn fry. If you want to find fish that actually provide something akin to mammal care of unborn fish, you will need to go to things like goodeids, which use a structure much like a placenta to nourish their unborn fry. This is far from the case with poeciliids like P reticulta, guppies.

Next subject: Guppy survival
Guppies will survive and thrive in a tank that meets certain minimum requirements.
The first is that the tank be cycled. That means that the filter is nicely controlling both ammonia and nitrites at a level that cannot be detected using a liquid type test kit, the kind with the tiny test tubes.
The second is that guppies are normally found in the wild in fairly hard and high pH water. To suit the guppies, you will need somewhat hard water, say GH and KH above 5 degrees and a pH of at least 7.0 and preferably higher. (My own guppies thrive and reproduce out of control at a GH and KH above 12 degrees and a tap water pH of 7.8.)
Another consideration is temperature. A guppy will not do well at less than about 68F, 20C, to about 78F, 27C. Below the 68F value the fish will seldom reproduce, but instead are living on the edge of their tolerance, and above the 78F value the fish will have a hard time getting enough oxygen to truly thrive. I like to run my own guppy tank at a value about in the midpoint, at 74F, 23C, so that the fish do not mature too quickly for their own health, as they can at higher temperatures but are also not restrained by temperatures that are just too low for their good health and robust development. At that temperature, my 10 gallon tank produces a regular surplus of 10 to 15 adults that can be removed every few months. At a local club auction, the very robust adults that I offer, from this simple setup, actually end up demanding a premium, for the fish. True hobbyists recognize the intense and robust health of these crowded and fairly young fish.

 

[Sacred]

Thanks for the reply. I think I found out what the main problem with my fish dying was, the silver tipped tetra, namely the males. I got some more guppies today, male and female and as soon as they was in the tetra males were after the male guppies tails. Seemed I had 3 male and 3 females, and they all seem very sexually charged and aggressive, even to each other. Rough breeders.

I have removed 4 so I am left with a male and female who are a pair and already things are alot more relaxed in my tank. Depending how it goes the remaining two might come out. We shall see. Though they are meant to be good in a community.

As for the breeding wise, well as you said that female wasn't close to birthing, she is getting abit fatter and the garvid spot is slowly darkening (it went back to brown) hopefully now with some males about maybe it will be more promising.

Will see how they go. But now the males can relax maybe they will stay alive.

Everyone seems to put about that guppies are so easy to care for and hardy but I am not so sure, they seem to be more specialised then some of these places make out.