Help! Guppy fry - what can I do?

My guppies keep giving birth. I have 10 fry in a week-old tank already, and I can tell there are at least 2 more batches to come! The thing is, I don't have any space for them in the tank when they're fully grown. I can't keep them. They're surviving really well in floating plants and haven't been eaten by any of the other fish (they're too fast!) so the numbers will just keep growing. I'm going to ask my lfs if they'll take them, but they might well not... so what can I do? I don't want to kill them :'(

Please help!

 

HI Bill

Again , I know we've discussed my answer in another thread, but it's good that you are making a thread of its own on this subject, so I'll answer again the same thing as this will be useful to more members with the same problem then.

So I have the same situation with mollies (looooadsa babies) and here's what I suggest:
- Don't despair, you may have this really easy solution at hand. Your fish store may well take the babies. When you ask, don't be a dummy like me: I never really mentioned getting store credit for it, hoping he'd offer. Fat chance. When I eventually did mention it, he said no.
- If you are getting overwhelmed by the situation, then it's time to think of splitting the males and the females. In your male-only tank, please make sure that you have plenty of males (like 5?) to avoid dominance issues repeatedly occurring between the same two fish, thus intensely stressing the loosing one out.
- If you do not have any moral objections to this, a lean self-sustaining solution would be to feed your fry as feeder fish for your carnivorous fish in another tank.I don't have any moral objections to this but it's picking the one that'll get eaten next that I don't have the strength for!
- You might also want to get rid of some of the hiding places at least. This is not a step I don't want to take right now as my adult mollies enjoy them so much.

 

Thanks a lot Armadillo! :-* I'll ask my LFS. If they say no, I suppose my ram or gourami might eat them? :-\ But that's really not a road I want to go down. I can't remove hiding places either, because they're basically all plants which don't like to keep being uprooted.

Cheers for the advice; wish me luck ;D

 

Yeah that's it: it's not really a nice thing to have to do, is it? To have to take a fry to its certain death in the carnivore tank? I see what you mean.

 

you can give the fry to the local shop. buy a separate tank, 10 gallon maybe? how large is the tank the mother is giving birth in? you could put in a tank divider to keep the mother separate from the fry

 

This was a very old thread