A Feast of Fry

My Platy momma gave birth to 20+ fry tonight. I sat there watching for about 2 hours. (This was at the same time as my gouramis were mating). This is the very first time I've ever seen her give birth - she always does it at night so I never see it. She just weaves into the vallisnerias and tilts until her head is upside down and kinda shimmies a bit until live babies swim out of her.

It was sickening but fascinating at the same time. The teeny peach-colored platy fry would pop out of the female platy and be instantly chewed to bits by a guppy or gourami, or even the platy herself! Most of the fry did not survive for longer than 5 seconds (literally!).

The poor things were cornered and devoured with great gusto by my guppies, who only get the chance to eat live prey (fry) once a month. I even saw a teeny ghost shrimp snatch up an unsuspecting fry that was camouflaged into the gravel! It was ridiculous how the ghost shrimp swiped its pincers and shoved the baby into its mouth.

The female platy has been giving birth for the past 2 hours. Every 15-20 minutes, 2-3 babies would slide out of her at once. She's considerably thinner now (earlier she looked like she was about to blow up). You can tell she's about to give birth when her belly "squares up" and looks like a rectagular box.

She eats ferociously when she gives birth because laboring wastes so much energy. Poor her...everyone chases her tail hoping to snatch up freshly born fry. My tank is literally floating with dead bits of fry everywhere and poop. There's quite a few decapitated heads floatin' about...kinda gross. After watching the massacre for about an hour, I decided to salvage what fry I could find left and put it into my betta's tank in hopes of saving them. I know, I know, it's not that much better, but I'm hoping that since my betta moves so slowly, it won't be able to catch the fry. Plus there's a large clump of Java moss in my betta's 10 gallon tank....I managed to salvage 4 frail lives from the wreckage. I don't know if they'll even last til morning though! :|

I mean, I knew what I was getting into by letting the fry be born free, but still, watching them get eaten like that by the other fish made me a little bit, just a little bit teary. Poor things...didn't even know what hit 'em.

I once had a fry survive for a whole month and she was really starting to show her colors when WHAM, she got eaten too when I introduced my first gourami. *Sigh* I really should've saved her - she was a survivor! She survived 2 moves and dodged 10 hungry fish, scrounging off bits of leftover food and algae (I never could feed her because she was always hiding)

Uh oh...I think my betta JUST realized that I put fry in the tank. It's dark, but I think he can still see them.......


By the way - you can sex a platy by looking at its anal fin. Females have a triangle "flag" shaped fin, while males have a long thin gonopodium that looks like a stick.

Some people prefer to plop their pregnant fish into a breeder net, which hooks onto the side of the fish tank. When the babies come out, they slide into a lower compartment and are protected. But I believe this severely stresses out the mother AND the babies because they are so cramped in such a tiny space.

I don't have a separate tank to spare just for fry....my policy is: survival of the fittest. There's plenty of plants in the tank - if the fry is smart and crafty as well as resourceful it'll live. Yeeks!