Breeding platys or Honey gouramis

[Nebula]

Got a 20 gallon long tank with nothing in it yet and a 10 gallon long with a betta and an Amani shrimp in it. I wanted to do a community tank for the 20 gallon but after reading on honey gouramis behavior they sounded like a really cool idea. I also wanted to do Platy fish as well in the same tank. My idea was to use a breeding box for the gourami and another one for the platy fry. My question would be to avoid overstocking the 20gallon could I wait for the platy fry to get big enough and put them in the betta tank which is heavily planted with caves for the shrimp already. Also the betta fish is pretty non aggressive he has had many roommates and all have done well with him.  But if not that should I just breed one fish or the other? 

[Hobbit]

I’ve bred both platys and honeys, so hopefully I can help you out here!

As for the platys: unless you only have one female platy, your two tanks will get very quickly overwhelmed. Right now I have four adult females breeding, and I have a ~12g area for the smallest fry, a 10g for medium fry, and a 20 long for the larger juveniles. That’s in addition to the areas the breeding groups live. I used to have just a 10g for the larger juveniles, but I recently upgraded to a 20 because I was using my quarantine tank to reduce overcrowding. 😄 I bring them to my LFS when they’re about 1.25 inches, which takes maybe 4 months. So if you go with platys… be ready to be overwhelmed! Or just hope that they eat some of their fry. 😉 

 As for whether you’ll be able to raise them in your betta tank, I’d say probably! Platys are pretty active and they like to explore, so I imagine if you ave 20 fry in with your betta, as they get older and bigger he’s going to get pretty annoyed with them. But if you’re taking them out to bring to your fish club or LFS or something when they’re still pretty small, he’ll probably be fine. He sounds like a chill dude.

Honeys are much more difficult to breed because the male needs to be able to make a bubble nest and protect it from the other fish in the tank. If you have a lot of platys in with your honeys, the male may not be able to keep them out of the nest. As I said above, platys are pretty active fish.

The other hard part is that you’ll need to feed the fry infusoria several times a day until they’re big enough to take live baby brine shrimp. In my experience that takes about three weeks. My honey fry will NOT eat anything but live food until I forcibly transition them off of it, which I don’t like to do until they’re fairly large (10-12 weeks in). I go from live BBS to frozen BBS to some kind of flake or pellet, and it takes about a week. They have to get hungry enough to consider trying the stuff that isn’t wriggling.

So all that said, I’d choose either one or the other rather than trying to do both. Honeys are super fun and extremely rewarding to breed. I love their behavior, and they’re definitely more interesting than platys in my opinion! But they’re complicated, and not everyone wants to take on that kind of project.

If you want to breed two creatures in your 20g, perhaps choose either honeys or platys and then do a ground dwelling fish, like plecos or corys?

Oh and one more thing: if you just want to keep platys and honey gouramis in your tank, they’ll do very well together. It’s the breeding part that might not work (for the honeys).

[Nebula]

Thank you very this was very informative from what ready I could find the gouramis sounded difficult but interesting but I will definitely keep your advice in mind if I consider breeding them. As for the platys I was not aware of how truly fast they breed my sister keeps guppies and they do breed but so far her 20 gallon has been enough. But I think I’ll stick with the platys for breeding and just keep the honey gouramis as roommates to help keep my platy population manageable. 

[Nebula]

For breeding the gouramis how many fry on average would you say the Honey gouramis have? Would my current number of tanks manage those numbers until I can give them to a LFS or friends or would it still be large numbers of fish? 

[Hobbit]

Well, the female will lay a LOT of eggs, but because it’s difficult to raise them, you will probably only end up with a few per generation. It’s a difficult balance the first three weeks between feeding them enough infusoria to survive, yet not ruining the water quality in the fry box. I’ve raised four broods, and largest of those was 16 fish. The others were 3, 3, and 6. I would say your current tanks would be enough for them—I just had the parent tank, a fry box, and a 10g when I started. 🙂

You can check out “breeding honey gourami” in my signature for more details!

[SJ fishing]

I got 6 platys in October, now have around 300.  I find they are hard to get rid of as fast as they breed 

[Henry the fish keeper]

I think platys are easier to breed than honey gouramis. I haven´t bred platies yet but will soon. Platies will breed like wildfire pumping out a ton of babies.

Edited April 12, 2022 by Henry the fish keeper