Ok, well here's the collection of what we've advised on livebearers:
What we did was convert the 10g platy tank from gravel to those flat marbles you find in the craft dept.. you have to keep up on cleaning it, since food & poo slide down to the tank bottom but it gives the fry a lot of ability to hide from the adults until we find them. If you want to avoid the extra tank cleaning work, stick with gravel though. The upside to the flat marbles is no gravel dust to worry about when you do a baby search.
We also planted a whole bunch of fake plants real close together in a calm area (the side away from the filter) of the tank for the fry to hide in. For the filter, we cut the netting off of a fish net & wrapped it tight around the intake with a clean rubber band. Make sure the netting doesn't have any gaps/bunches the tiny fry could swim into & get sucked into the filter. The best way to do it, is to turn the filter off and take the intake tube off & out of the tank. That makes it easier to put the netting on right.
You'll know your platy is getting closer when you can see the little black dots in her stomach. She'll square off back around her anal fin when it's getting to be near time.
We had another 10 gallon tank for the fry. nothing on the bottom and the filter set up the same way as the adults tank. A cave or 2, maybe a couple of soft little plants will help them feel safer with hiding spots.
For the fry, you'll need fry food if you can get it at the store. If not, what we do is put flakes in a sandwich bag and using a rolling pin to crush them into powder. Then we feed them a pinch in the morning & evening.
She'll probably drop fry every few weeks or so (25 days is avg) after the 1st batch.
She'll probably have them at night - at least our Platy Daisy liked to, so each morning starting the day we spotted the first fry until 3-4 days later, we did a baby check to see if we found any fry anywhere in the tank. If we found some, then we took out all the decoration and put the other fish in a big bowl while we search for fry. When we had gravel, we just would carefully go through the gravel from one side to the other a few times, moving it around to see if any fry would dart out. With marbles, we took the marbles out a handful at a time into a bucket (with some tank water to keep the marbles wet) making sure we haven't grabbed any fry by accident. We actually could take out all the marbles and still find fry hiding in the debris on the bottom.. They are SO good at hiding. As long as we had everything out, we cleaned up any debris (like old food or poop) after being sure no fry are still in the tank, then we put everything back.
I know I typed a lot & it seems like a ton of work.. but i wanted to cover all the details we've learned thru trial & error I could so you'll get all the fry saved that you can.. and it is a bit of work, but they're super adorable swimming around. Sadly, they don't all make it but keeping them in 80-82 degree clean water and adding vitachem helps. It's hard to keep it totally clean, put try to clean the bottom of the food dust/poop every 2 or 3 days, watching out for the babies. Every now and then, take a half of a cooked pea and try to crush it in the water so that it gets all powdery (try it in a bowl of water & you'll see what i mean). They love the treat and it helps their systems.
Hope this helps and that you have many healthy fry.
Similar Aquarium Fish Forum Threads
