lalynya

Ok this is kind of gross but the other day while cleaning my tank I noticed a little wiggler so my thought was Ok the guppy is giving birth sooner then expected I should get her in the breeder box..nothing for the rest of the day..I woke up the next day to find a bunch of guppy babies but none of them alive...I'm pretty sure it is because the camalanus (inner parasite that protrudes out of the anus) but has anything like this happened to anyone else?

FishKing

This could be because of stress. Do you keep the female guppy with males throught the entire breeding period Or it could be just a bad batch.

lalynya

I keep her in teh tank till around due date..They did come kinda early this cycle..Right now because of the stupid parasite she is the only grown female guppy I have left but a lot of my males have died off from natural causes so there aren't too many to harass her. Can keeping her with the males really stress her out that much...well she is in hospital tank right now recovering and getting more treatment for the parasite.

corylover

I would say it was stress the males will harass her to death

lalynya

But how would that cause her to have still borns...I guess it's just another example of how many things can cause problems with fish

KittieKat

i think moving her did it. im not a fish breeder myself and i dont keep males and females together but ive heard if u move her at the wrong time it can stress her causing her to give birth early, and have most of the babies pass because of the premature births. idk.. like i said im no expert at breeding

Chief_waterchanger

Different strains behave drastically different, but for the most part we don't have this problem.

We don't tend to move the females anymore, but we get about the same amount of babies by having thick live plants in the tank for the fry to use for hiding. We look at that as taking some of the stress away from the female while saving babies, so it is a win/win situation, however, the previous posters could be correct.

Sometimes the males will harass females to death, sometimes moving them can cause stress issues that weaken them to the point that something that wouldn't have killed them before would kill them. (Kinda like Immune-defecent humans can sometimes be killed by the common cold.) Livebearers, for the most part, can abort their fry at will. Guppies, mollies, platies, etc can, if they feel the conditions are unsafe for their fry, abort the fry and absorb the fetii back into their systems (scavenging them for nutrition, sorta), or can go ahead and have them and just have still born fry.

Breeding fish is all about keeping the stress level as low as you can WITHOUT using chemicals. For guppies that could include some of the following:

-lots of dense live plants (guppy grass and aquatic mosses are good choices)
-high female to male ratio (2f per 1m is the absolute least there should be, the more Fs per Ms the better. 5f per 1m would be awesome. One male could take care of keeping 50 or more females going constantly. The reason being that female livebearers store sperm for upwards of 6 months, so as long as the male can continue to keep them with sperm they are going strong for months. )
-Not overfeeding
-Keeping a good waterchange schedule. (You do not want ammonia, nitrites, or nitrates to cause stress with the fish.)
-Turn on lights in the room several minutes BEFORE you turn on the lights to the tank. You do not want to startle your fish. (There have been fish slam into the side of a tank and kill themselves or, in some of the larger fish, break the glass in similar situations.)

Hope any or all of that helped you.

lalynya

wow thanks...I guess with the first breed I had being so successfull I didnt realize there could be any problems..Is putting her into the breeding box even though its still in the same tank really the same thing as moving her does it stress her out that much..Thank you very much for your replies I have learned so so much allready from being on this site you guys just keep the information coming

COBettaCouple

It can be as stressful to her, since she's suddenly in a different tank that's much smaller (to her).