Guppy Birth
The Secrets of Guppy Birth
Guppy birth is sometimes a mystery to people. You will often find questions from guppy owners on aquarium sites asking why their guppy has not given birth to fries like some of their previous fish did. These confusions about guppy reproduction arise from one of the peculiarities of the guppy lifecycle—namely, that they are livebearers.
What are “livebearers”?
Livebearers are fish that give birth with eggs but that keep the eggs inside the body until after they hatch. The advantage this give is that the guppy fries release into the water when they are larger, able to feed and swim, and therefore less vulnerable to predation. This advantage has made guppies one of the most popular aquarium fish ever since they tend to survive in greater numbers during breeding than other types of similar fish.
Typical Birth Pattern
The guppy’s sex life is actually much more interesting than you might expect. After sex, it takes about four weeks until guppies give birth. A typical guppy birth usually yields 10 to 30 fries. Within a few hours of giving birth, females are ready to get pregnant again. However, these little breeders might not need to have relations with a male in order to do this, because guppies don’t have a one sexual episode to one guppy birth episode limitation like we do. Guppies have what we call “sperm retention.” This means that the females can hold on to the sperm from one episode and use it to get pregnant again. This partly explains how prolific guppies can be when it comes to reproduction.
Protecting Fries after Birth
Another feature of guppy birth, however, is the problem of predation by adult guppies. Typically, if the aquarium caretaker does not take any precautions, the adult guppies (including the father) will eat the fries once they are free from the mother’s body. If you want to protect the baby guppies after birth, here are the steps you can take.
First, look to keep you tank well fed. Well-fed adult guppies are less likely to turn on their own for more food.
Second, several physical setups can make your aquarium safer for your guppies. One way is to provide your guppy fries with lots of seaweed to hide in. This mimics their condition in the wild and is the most natural way of helping them. However, it is not the most effective way of protecting them, since they will still wander out and be eaten and since the ones at the edge of the seaweed can sometimes fall victim as well.
Another way is to keep you adult guppies well fed until your female guppy gives birth and then to create a netted area where the baby guppies can hide out. This works better than the seaweed method. A similar method is to use cage.
Perhaps the most popular, economic and efficient way of protecting guppy babies, however, is by using a divider in the middle of your aquarium to keep the adults and young apart. This keeps you from having the expense of buying a completely new aquarium just for babies, while still giving the babies maximum protection.
Of course, some guppy purists recommend having a “breeder tank,” a tank completely dedicated to the guppy fries. Usually the logic behind this is that it helps in terms of feeding them and it doesn’t compromise the beauty of your main tank.
Feeding Guppies after Birth
There are also a few different ways to feed guppies after birth. The easiest but least effective way is just to continue feeding the entire tank their regular flaky food and let the baby guppies get the leftovers from the adults. This however, is likely to lead to further fry deaths as they venture out of the seaweed or starve. You can also crush flaky food into much smaller bits to help increase the chances that some of them will get to the baby fries.
Of course, if you have a separate area for the fries, then you can simply feed them crushed flakes without worry. If you really want to give them the food they crave, then brine shrimp is the way to go. This is extra work, but well worth it in the long run.