Breeding livebearers

[Born to Breed]

The last time I bred and raised any FW livebearers like platys, mollies and swordtails I was in high school, that was fifty years ago 🤣  I've been strictly marine for the past 30 years or so but now I'm returning to my roots. I have a lot of experience breeding marine species but this is totally different.  Is it normal for a female to drop just a few fry per day over several days?  I thought they'd all come at once but no, I have 3 platy's and a molly all doing the same thing, a few per day for several days.  ????????? 

 

 

[Guppysnail]

Yes perfectly normal. Sometimes they drop all at once sometimes a few here and there. 

[nabokovfan87]

I'm struggling with this as well. Trying so hard to get fry and it's been months. One of the females is going to release any moment now and it's just a bit awkward to judge the timing.

In my other tank, there's 4 females and 2 males and they just don't seem interested.

Maybe they had their fry already and they didn't make it or they were just absorbed. So difficult to judge.

[TOtrees]

I also see both patterns, ie a few here and there vs all at once. I think there is some choice by the female, and I suspect that choice is driven by a few factors. Things that will precipitate or incentivize a larger drop include "this place is awesome, and there is lots of food and cover for my babies", and on the complete other end of the spectrum, "my survival here is not assured, I better get rid of this load that's slowing me down so I can live to breed another day". I've often found that a location change (moving fish between tanks) will precipitate a large drop. Eg one summer I bought a very pregnant swordtail and moved her right away into a cycled and ready back yard tub, empty of fish but with green water and good cover, and the pond was full of babies the next day. 

If you're setting up a tank for breeding, you need cover cover cover. Places for the babies to retreat to where the adults can't get them, or won't bother. I use massive mats or clumps of hornwort up top, and jungles of java moss down low. One option is to set up half the tank with more open water for the adults, and half with dense cover for the babies. 

[Born to Breed]

Yes this is already really frustrating for me, I am used to pulling nests and dealing with 100's of larvae that all come at once.  That is actually much easier than this one here, one there style of raising fish.  I've already realized that moving the fry to a separate tank is not practical so I'm going for the wild "let nature take it's course" approach 🤣  I removed all adult fish but the pregnant females and do have a fair amount of live and plastic plants in there.  Also I added some guppies to sort of fill the gap between the adults and the new fry.  There are one month and two month old juveniles in there as well.  The adults don't really seem interested in eating fry, they even bump into them sometimes and totally disregard them.  

[Maximus]

I started breeding Vienna guppies the other day, and am counting the fry periodically throughout the day. I'm using the pond basket that Dean showed how to make (less than $4 at Lowe's, home Depot didn't have them, more expensive online), don't even need the Backer Bar since it sits perfectly in a 10 gallon...

 

I noticed them coming out one by one over the course of half a day, and then it seemed to stop in the late afternoon/early evening. I had a higher period of activity in there cleaning up at that point, so that may explain it. Going to continue to track today and probably put them back in their main tank with the males when I don't see new fry for 24 hours or so. 🤷‍♂️

Edited July 6, 2023 by Maximus

[JBNSN]

My guppies do this regularly! Sometimes just 1-2 a day over a spawn of a few days. As they mature and get pregnant again they can give birth to more at a time.