Trey

My biggest peeve is willful ignorance. Next comes those people who, when they actually decide to research something, choose to believe the wrong source(s) over reliable ones. Next comes those people who, after choosing to believe the wrong information for whatever reason, wind up having problems and then dare to complain.

I can't find a delete button.

A female will dump a load of stored sperm if she mates with a new male, BUT only if that new mating happens within several hours of her giving birth. That's important. If you want to use a certain female to make a certain cross with a certain male, then of course it's best if she is a virgin. That's not always possible, though, so the next best thing to do is to wait for her to drop her next batch of fry and put her with your chosen male about 4 to 8 hours later. If she mates with your preferred male before giving birth, his sperm won't get stored and she'll use previously stored stuff for her next batch. SOME of the new sperm might get used by pure luck, but not enough to be useful. If you wait too long, the same thing happens. There is only a limited window of opportunity available for getting her to make a full switch. The process of birthing/recovering opens up some valves and closes some others. Anyway, that's a trick the pro breeders use.

There used to be a kind of Platy called the Sunburst Tuxedo. It was awesome. For some reason, though, they've pretty much vanished. If you could figure out how to recreate it, you'd never be able to keep up with the demand. It shouldn't be too terribly hard to do. As for guppies, they're always in demand. However, quality is a very important factor. Good fish are worth a lot more than junk.

If your Angels spawn weekly but you've never seen any wigglers, then it's likely that you have two females. Yes, really.

White Cloud parents don't eat their fry. HOWEVER... The fry themselves are very cannibalistic. What tends to happen is that you'll lose about half of your first batch of fry, and then lose pretty much all of the next batches. If you want to produce a lot of fish, then the thing to do is remove each batch and put them in their own tank. They are slow growing, so this takes awhile, but once they've reached the half-inch mark you can safely recombine them. If you just let them do their own thing with no interference from you, then you'll usually have a few young fish in the tank at any given time, since some will survive. As for food, I feed my fry a very finely powdered food called "fry crack." I'm not sure if I could explain where to get it. Googling the name might help. That's okay, though, because you can just grind up some good old Tetra-Min into flour and it works just fine. Baby White Clouds are teeeeny-tiny and need very small food, but it doesn't have to be green water or any other live food. I raise Vietnam Cardinal White Clouds, Tanichthys micagammae. If I had the tank space I could produce a few hundred per week, as they're very easy to spawn. Raising them is the hard part. They turn on and eat each other like crazy, much worse than regular White Clouds.