# Pregnate platy



## fly4awhiteguy (Dec 27, 2011)

I came home from work today and my wife pointed out to me that one of the platys in my community tank looked preggers..... So I googled some pic and some reading material, and from what I saw, I believe this fish to be about 1-2 days away from giving birth. I pulled my 5 gal out of storage filled it with water from my community tank, put a sponge on the intake for the filter and dropped in an airstone.. she is now in the 5 gal. is there anything else I should be doing? Also.. my last attempt at hatching bbs was very unsuccessful.. is there anything else that fry will eat?.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Platies have relatively large fry, so you can feed them very finely crushed flake foods, and I think you can get a dry type of fry food also. But they will grow better and enjoy eating live foods like BBS. If you don't have much luck raising BBS, you could try the frozen kind. Just take a thin slice of one frozen piece and break it up before you feed it, you don't want to have any left overs go bad in the water. They should be fed five or six times a day.

If you can, get a breeding trap before the fry are born. They are not very expensive. The kind that has an upper and lower section, with a removable divider between them. The female goes in the upper part and when the fry are born, they will mostly sink or swim into the lower portion. Once all are born, put Mom back in her aquarium. If she is left with her fry, she will eat them !

Once she is out of the trap, you can either take out the divider and keep the fry in it for a day or two, or let them out into the new tank. But do make sure to test your water in the new tank, because if you don't have a mature filter in there, you could get an ammonia spike, even though you used your other tank's water to fill it. Tank water on it's own has very little in the way of the bacteria that convert nitrites to nitrates, etc. If it was a mature sponge filter you used, from an established tank, you should be ok. 

Also, fry like to hide, since they are food for whatever finds them in the wild, including their own parents. So they need hiding places. Floating plants with thick roots or something like hornwort is good.


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## fly4awhiteguy (Dec 27, 2011)

thanks for the info... I went and got a fry trap yesterday.. but have not put her in it yet as she is still pretty active.. and I am under the impression that when she gets close to delivering she will stopp eating, and stay in one spot.. here are some pics of her and the tank.
















now having seen the pic of her is it safe to say she is full of babies or do I need to put her on a diet?


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Sure looks preggers to me . I am not an expert, but in my experience, if they've had a male around for any length of time, pregnancy is inevitable. Like guppies, they're kind of like bunnies, they like to do the happy dance. Don't wait too long to put her in the trap, just because most fish might stop eating and stay in one place, does not mean every fish will do that. It won't harm her to spend a few days in there, and you'll be sure not to lose babies for being a bit late.


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## fly4awhiteguy (Dec 27, 2011)

I put her in the trap last night... And it was perfect timing because at 8:30 this morning my wife texted me that there were 14 baby fish.. mom is now back in the big tank and I have started feeding the fry frozen bbs


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Congratulations ! Good luck with raising the fry. Once they're older, start feeding them a bit of finely crushed flake food too, so they get used to it being food. Since it's what they'll mostly be fed when they're grown, best to get them used to it early on, but the BBS help a lot with the fats and things they need to grow well when they're tiny. You could also try a micro or banana worm culture. They are really easy to keep going, very simple compared to BBS. You just sprinkle dry yeast over the culture every couple of days to feed them, and when the culture starts to get old, you begin a new one with a small container of mushy oatmeal and innoculate it from the old culture. Ready to go in a week or so, and you use up the old one in the meantime. Several members sell the cultures. Scotmando has them all the time.


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## fly4awhiteguy (Dec 27, 2011)

Awesome thanks..


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## bettasandbeads (Aug 18, 2010)

*Platy*

Cangrates.
New babies are always fun. You will be surprised how fast they grow.
Feeding them a couple times a day will help. 
If they don't eat all the flake food, use a turkey baster to remove it.
The left over food can foul the water very quickly.
Now that the Momma has had babies don't be surprised if every 3-4 weeks you don't get a new batch.
Good luck. You will have a nice batch to take to the fall auctions to sell.
Catherine


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## fly4awhiteguy (Dec 27, 2011)

it took a few days to get a decent pic since they were so small and wouldnt stay still... but here they are.
















as soon as they are big enough they will be going 1st come 1st serve for free


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Very nice.. wish I room for some of them. Bit of a challenge getting pics of such tiny critters isn't it ?


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## fly4awhiteguy (Dec 27, 2011)

oh ya... not to mention, not very much to take a picture of.... for the 1st few days all I could see when I looked in the tank was 14 sets of little floating eyeballs. they are getting big fast now though.. they have tripled in size


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## Fishyfishyfishy (Mar 3, 2008)

From my experience with platy and guppies, the babies can survive even without the fish trap. They will hide in in your decoration.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

It's true fry will hide, if there's enough places to hide in, but it usually cuts down quite a lot on the numbers that will survive to adulthood. I had a number of livebearers give birth in a community tank I had back in my school days. It had virtually no plants but it did have lots of rocks and such. So some of the fry did survive. Perhaps two or three out of twenty or more that were born. If you keep the fry separately and away from their parents, who are as happy to eat their own kids as anything else they can find, the survival rates are much higher. Even with heavy plantings and lots of thick vegetation to hide in, you'll still get better survival with keeping fry separate until they are large enough not to be seen as food.


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