tuna

My original post was 'fish are dying". Thanks for all of your fish wisdom. We did a 25% water change to save the 2 fish left out of 12. It seemed to worked and the fish appear to be happy and livelier, however after the water change and gravel vac, we discovered several very tiny baby fish swimming around. What gives and what shall we do if anything to help them? Will they live?
Thanks again,
Tuna
P.S. After we changed the water, we had the water checked and the levels were just about in the normal range. We bought the American Pharmaceutical Water test kit at Petsmart at the Online price. Thanks for the information. We will be testing the water ourseves from this point on.

Manicivy

Well at least you have some babies to replace the fish that died. I read your other post and it looks like you had all livebearing fish so your babies are either swordtails, mollies, or platies, it will be hard to tell until they are a little older. The parents will eat them if they find them. So you can either net out the babies and put them in another tank, or if you dont have another tank put a lot of plants at the bottom that the babies can hide in. Every fish store carries these specific plastic plants called "baby hideouts".
You can also buy commercial liquid baby food (just follow the instructions on the bottle) or I believe just grind up flakes to very tiny pieces and they will eat this as well.
The only other advice I can give is to make sure the babies cannot get sucked up into the filter. How you deal with that depends onw hat filter you have.
Good luck, keep us posted.

chickadee

If you have a filter with an intake tube on it, you can cover the intake tube with a new sock (nylon stocking) to keep them from being sucked up into the intake tube. Or you can get a small breeding net to put into the large tank so that they can live in there until they grow big enough to be on their own.

Rose

Butterfly

Most live bearer fry are big enough to eat crushed flakes at birth. Good luck and keep up the water changes
Carol