Pregnant Platy

[joannajane]

I'm very new to keeping fish so am in need of some advise.
For eight or nine weeks now I've been setting up my 35ltr tank and after a few weeks I added two platies and two guppies all are doing very well and I test water regularly. A week ago I woke up to see 5 tiny fly dashing about the bottom of my tank. I was under the impresion that all my fish were male, but as it happens, no! after a little research I was able to tell that it was my platy that was a girl and i'm the proud mother of 5 fry. I have tried to catch them but just end up slashing water about everywhere. I deceided to pop to the local garden centre and purschase some more bushy plants for them to hide in and this is where they seem to like to hide. I've read many websites that say that they will get eaten. 100% chance they will not survive. They are eating well and all nitrite and nirate levels are good.
Please help my with my options.
1) leave them and see, but I think I would like them to survive.
2) a breeding trap, my tank is a bioube so I have little space for a breeding trap and i'm finding it hard to catch them.
3) get another tank set up quiclky which I could them tranfere between the two hopefully seperating male and femailes as I go or is this just going to muliyply the dilemma?
4) and is it true that my platy will be giving birth again in 28 days? but to more fry? could this be a one off?
Many thanks to anyone who can talk me thru this experince.
Btw, the aquatic shop was keen on taking back the female and I am very fond of all of them.
Joanna

 

[LauraFrog]

Does the male platy chase and harass the female? If they seem to be getting on okay without the male pestering the female to mate, you should be fine. Usually the advice is to get more females, but in such a small tank you don't really have room. Personally I'd leave them.

If you leave them, there is a fair chance they will survive. The ones that get through their first few weeks usually make it - it's just that the majority get chomped immediately. Your platy probably had about twenty or thirty fry, and you're seeing the surviving fry that are about a week old - they can put on half their size again in this time.

Platys do have fry about every 30 days. She could have anywhere between 15 and 50 or so, this is the 'normal' range. If you try to save all of them, you are going to end up with more tanks than a public aquarium. In my opinion, your best option is to plant the tank well with bushy plants (hiding places) and let nature take its course. In her lifespan a wild platy could produce up to or over 1000 fry, and assuming wild populations are stable it's normal for just two of those fry to survive and reproduce. So you will still get better survival rates than that, most likely.

If you really want to save them, a breeding net isn't really an option. They will be too big for it very soon - a breeding pair of platys will overstock your tank very rapidly, and if you keep all of the fry instead of letting three or four from each drop survive, the tank will be vastly overstocked very soon. If you let nature take its course, you will be able to remove the three or four when they are a few months old and big enough to sell. The only use of breeding traps is to save the fry as soon as they are born - you put the mother in it to give birth. Personally I don't recommend them - if you decide you want to save all the fry your female has I can talk you through those.

If you really want to get another tank and start raising platys - go for it, but consider this your Multiple Tank Syndrome warning: get another tank now, and you will be overrun. It's not a bad thing really... but others in your life may not see it that way. (Last week I lined part of my cupboard with plastic sheeting to accommodate another 12 betta tanks... I guess 'understanding' is a bit too much to ask from my parents after that sort of extreme behavior.)

Good luck and hope this helps.

 

[joannajane]

My female platy seems to spend a bit more of her time under the bushy plants but comes to the side of the tank to see me whenever I look for her. she is still feeding and swims around when the light is on. The male occasionally is found to be happily to sit next to her for a while before dashing off back to his guppy friends.

I really appericate your advise I think I'm am end up with a few too many platy than I was hoping for so I think the best option is to get a bigger tank and keep this small one as the breeding tank as it so little. If I get one over the weekend it'll be a month or so really before I can think of moving my males out but would this my female lonely with just her and the fry? And in the mean time she'll be giving birth once again.

What size tank would you suggest as I would oneday like a bit of variety in my community and I'm really hoping to get some cardinal tetras sometime in the summer or am I just dreaming now because of she'll be filling every spare inch with babies?

thanks so much.
Joanna

Does the male platy chase and harass the female? If they seem to be getting on okay without the male pestering the female to mate, you should be fine. Usually the advice is to get more females, but in such a small tank you don't really have room. Personally I'd leave them.

If you leave them, there is a fair chance they will survive. The ones that get through their first few weeks usually make it - it's just that the majority get chomped immediately. Your platy probably had about twenty or thirty fry, and you're seeing the surviving fry that are about a week old - they can put on half their size again in this time.

Platys do have fry about every 30 days. She could have anywhere between 15 and 50 or so, this is the 'normal' range. If you try to save all of them, you are going to end up with more tanks than a public aquarium. In my opinion, your best option is to plant the tank well with bushy plants (hiding places) and let nature take its course. In her lifespan a wild platy could produce up to or over 1000 fry, and assuming wild populations are stable it's normal for just two of those fry to survive and reproduce. So you will still get better survival rates than that, most likely.

If you really want to save them, a breeding net isn't really an option. They will be too big for it very soon - a breeding pair of platys will overstock your tank very rapidly, and if you keep all of the fry instead of letting three or four from each drop survive, the tank will be vastly overstocked very soon. If you let nature take its course, you will be able to remove the three or four when they are a few months old and big enough to sell. The only use of breeding traps is to save the fry as soon as they are born - you put the mother in it to give birth. Personally I don't recommend them - if you decide you want to save all the fry your female has I can talk you through those.

If you really want to get another tank and start raising platys - go for it, but consider this your Multiple Tank Syndrome warning: get another tank now, and you will be overrun. It's not a bad thing really... but others in your life may not see it that way. (Last week I lined part of my cupboard with plastic sheeting to accommodate another 12 betta tanks... I guess 'understanding' is a bit too much to ask from my parents after that sort of extreme behavior.)

Good luck and hope this helps.

 

[LauraFrog]

Sounds like a good course of action. If you get a tank of about 80-100 litres, you can put the fish you currently have in there. Then whenever they have babies, you can move the fry into the tank you currently have until they are big enough to give away, sell, or put back in the main tank.

Platys are capable of producing huge numbers of fry. If you have two or three females breeding you can end up with 60 or 70 new fry a month. Unless you want to go for a full blown breeding setup (serious breeders usually have dedicated heated, insulated garden sheds...) you won't be able to raise every single fry that gets born. But with a breeding tank you will be able to raise most of them to a size that you can sell/move/give away.

A tank of about 80-100L (20/25USG) is a good size for a tropical community. Generally the larger the tank is, the easier it is to keep water conditions stable. Cardinals are fairly sensitive fish, so even though they might be comfortable in a smaller tank I wouldn't keep them in anything much less than about 80L. You could have a big school of them plus the fish you currently have and maybe a few more female platys, or else a smaller school of cardinals and some other peaceful tropical fish.

You definitely can't put cardinals in the tank you currently have. Cardinals need to be in schools of at least six, and while you might get that many in the tank you'd have to get rid of all your other fish. Personally I wouldn't risk putting them in a small tank like that anyway.

If you're thinking about setting up a second tank, you might find some of the articles (pinned in the New To The Hobby) section helpful. It doesn't sound like anybody has explained the nitrogen cycle to you - what do you test the water for?

 

[joannajane]

My local aqautic shop told me that in our area that the amonia level are very safe so I don't need to test of that so before each water change I fill a bucket with water and add the stress coat to remove the chlorine and ammonia. But I am testing my nirite levels which are at 0.1 at the moment and my nitrate are at 5.

I think I found a tank that I like but I just have to ask my boyfriend whether he minds the place I have chosen of it to be. I'm planing to get it up and running asap so I'll get a good chance to get the level down before I lose too many fry.

Thanks once again for you advise I really appericate it.
Joanna

 

[LauraFrog]

Okay, sounds like a nitrogen cycle explanation is in order. Forgive the long-windedness of this, and if I miss something or bits are unclear please ask.

Ammonia, chlorine and chloramine are all chemicals that can be added to drinking water supplies to remove bacteria, and it's good that you're using water conditioner to get rid of them before you put the water in the tank. The problem is that it doesn't end here. Fish constantly produce ammonia. It results from their respiration, their excretion, and any uneaten food or plant leaves that rot in the tank. Ammonia is extremely toxic to fish, and starts to get dangerous at fractions of one part per million. If nobody told you about this, you were very lucky not to lose fish on startup of your tank - many of the members on this forum, including myself, came here when a pet store neglected to mention the nitrogen cycle to us and our fish were poisoned by ammonia.

You'll often hear people referring to a 'cycled' tank - this is one where there is never any ammonia or nitrite due to bacterial action. In a 'mature' or 'cycled' tank, you need two species of bacteria growing. They both live in the filtration media. One of them converts ammonia into nitrite, and the other converts nitrite into nitrate. Nitrite is also toxic, but nitrate is not.

It sounds like the people at the pet store don't really understand the nitrogen cycle - this is not uncommon. The fact that there is nitrite in your tank means that it isn't fully cycled, as a healthy cycled tank should have ammonia and nitrite reading zero at all times. The reading is very low, so this isn't a disaster especially since all the fish are healthy. It just means you need to keep a close eye on the tank, and probably do more water changes than usual - 2 x 50% changes a week for the next two weeks should be okay.

If there were no bacteria in the tank at all, the fish would all be dying, so there is obviously a considerable colony present, it just needs to get a bit bigger. Water changes and time will do that.

The only thing is that when you set up your new tank, it will not be 'cycled'. So if you put fish in it straight away, they will end up being poisoned by their own waste, as unfortunately happens quite often. It's called 'new tank syndrome' and it's very common, we average two threads a day on this forum from people who have stocked an un-cycled tank and don't understand why their fish are all sick.

Since you already have an established tank that is well on the way to being cycled, the easiest thing would probably be to move some of the filter media from your old tank into your new one when you set it up, then add fish slowly, one or two per week to allow the bacterial colony to slowly adjust. We can talk you through that. An ammonia test kit would probably be a smart investment though, especially if you do want to set up a second tank.
How big is the tank you've got your eye on?

 

[joannajane]

So I've got a ammonia testing kit on the shopping list for today and will be my first purchase. My levels are less than 0.1 for nirite and under 5 for nirate this morning. So i'm happy with those. All 5 fry have been spotted at feeding time and I think they are just over 10mm now, fingers crossed.

I'm looking at a choice bewteen three tanks, the first one is Fluvals Osaka 260 holding 260ltrs (56 gallons), it has an open top to the tank is that o.k?, it looks very stylist but is there such a thing as too big?

The second is fluvals' Vicenza 180 bow front which holds 151ltrs and lastly Rena's aqualife 200 which states 248ltrs total volume and 185 useful volume I'm not 100% sure what that refers to but I'll try and find out today.

If there is any recommendations for a tank then I'd love to see them.

I know that they is no definate time to 'cycle' a new tank but do you know approximetly?

If I were to place some of my cermaic filter media from my small bioube into the new tank could I return it once the second tank is 'cycled' as it is not suitable for catfish or loach due it is sharpe edges. what about using the water that I am removing can I add that? or will it be to dirty as it has little pieces of food and plants.

I'm going to do a bit of reading now to get a better understand of how to set up a new tank as i'm not keen on the idea of losing fish when it can be avoided, sounds like I've been extremely lucky so far.

Thank you,
Joanna