11!

A piece of information I didn’t share with the blog was that I’ve recently acquired yet another fish tank. I was given an old tank by a client of mine (let’s say customer rather, client sounds too kinky) who had found it in his garage and was considering to throw it away. The tank was in good shape and, unable to resist, I decided to fill it up with fish.

Cause that’s what you do with a fish tank.

I was at a mind to get another Betta, but the tank was too big and I couldn’t help but feel that my Betta Lan wanted to remain a single child. So, I settled on guppies for two reasons.
1) They were good beginner tropical fish. I’ve never actually kept a large tank of tropical fish (having been a gold fish keeper all my life) and I felt that they would be excellent fish to practice on.
2) They bred very easily. Why does this matter? Well – I want to start breeding Bettas at some point and figured that guppy fry were excellent to practice on.

I popped 4 into the tank – 1 male and 3 females along with a pleco to keep the algae under control. When I got back home with the 4 I realized immediately that my one female was already pregnant. Whoopee do!

I jumped online, did my research and had to deal with her giving birth that very same weekend. I managed to get 22 baby fry, which did alright the first week but then, over a weekend, 20 died. Epic failure for a first try and I was so irritated with it that I almost sold all of the guppies and just put in more gold fish.

But, I did my research, made better plans and just 3 days after the majority of my babies died, I was rewarded by 9 more from another female. This time, I played it smart, changed my rearing tactics and now the babies are 2 weeks old and doing fine. When they were born, they were about 6mm but now, they’ve already grown to 12mm. The only problem that I have now is that the more adventurous of the babies keep sneaking out of their breeding tank to join the other bigger fish.

And get eaten for their trouble.

When I got back home over the weekend (after spending it with my Other Half and charging my visiting mother with taking care of my babies) I realized to my disappointment that 2 of my fry had escaped. I managed to find one but the other (one of only 2 left over from my first batch) was nowhere to be found. I said a little prayer for fish heaven and resumed to taking care of the remaining 10. Two days passed and I had all but forgotten about the little fry when quite suddenly this morning, I found a dark fry swimming around happily on the surface of my tank. At first, I thought it was the other fry but when I looked into the breeder box he was still there. Amazingly, my baby fry had survived in the tank for 3 days without being eaten and returned to the nest!

I was (and still am) overjoyed.

Now, I’m back to having 11 fry and I have to say, they are looking great!