03 April 2012

One Fish, Two Fish, Here Comes a New Fish!

Or a lot of new fishes. A whole lot. Up to 120 new fishes a whole lot.

As part of the boys Christmas and part of my birthday we got a fish tank back in December.

After dealing with everything to get it set up and working through the nitrogen cycle (something I knew NOTHING about until I was dealing with it). We had a happy little environment going.

We had a few Neon Tetras, I have loved these little fish since I was about 4 years old; a yellow snail, and 3 male guppies. Two of the guppies had separate issues and recently died. So in order to keep our remaining guppy from getting too lonely, I went and got another two guppies.

Lo and behold, when I got home I realized that one of them was a female. And she is pregnant. So I did some research, learned that if a female is too stressed out from a gender imbalance and the males won't leave her alone she'll STAY PREGNANT UNTIL SHE DIES.

Having been pregnant and overdue, I could not in good conscience let that happen. So what to do? I can't just kill her, once she's been in the tank I can't take her back to the store unless she's sick or dead. Starting another tank is not an option.

So I went back and got 2 more females. Maxing out our tank and winding up with 3 tiny, hormonally supercharged, mama fish. The males are happy.

So now we're going to have lots of babies. I've decided to let nature take it course as far as the babies go. I've planted the bottom of the tank to give them their best chance of hiding. And if any of them survive we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I almost feel bad, but when I read about success rates of getting guppy fry to survive with out an in-depth set up...well, they'll have about the same chance if they stay in the community tank.

I thought fish were supposed to be easy pets...I need a dog...

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2 comments:

  1. Ooh my goodness, stay pregnant forever?!? So glad you're helping and can't wait to hear how it goes.

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  2. Oh my! We set up a 10 gallon tank years ago with 2 guppies. It wasn't long before one was pregnant. I read all of the articles about it and thought that we too would be lucky if the kids saw any survive. Fast forward two months and we couldn't see the water for all of the fish!

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