![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Feesh
When I got a female variatus platy for my aquarium a while back, I thought I was just getting a nice pretty fish. Little did I know that what I was getting was a nice pretty fish who'd done the piscene wild thing with some fella before I bought her.
I discovered this little fact about her past when, a while back, I spotted a whole lotta babie fish in the aquarium. I know that none of the current boys in there were the dad since all the babies looked just like their mother. None of 'em resembled even slightly either the red or the orange wag males. Female platys can keep fertilized eggs inside themselves in various stages of development for up to a year before giving birth.
I knew that all those babies were going to start putting a severe bioload on the tank when they started growing a bit, so I started setting up a 2nd aquarium. Just a 20 gallon, but it'd let me get the lil guys out of the big tank. Planning ahead, I put some extra media in the main tank's filter so that I could use it to seed the new tank and make it cycle faster. For whatever reason, that didnt' really help. The new tank just wasn't starting to cycle. The babies kept growing though and Saturday I ended up moving 'em to the new tank even though it's not ready. They were just getting too big to leave in the big tank any longer.
I transferred water from the big tank to a clean bucket then went about netting the babies and putting 'em in there. I'd never been able to get a proper count of the babies in the tank and figured there were about 10. After catching them all, the number turned out to be 13. Sheesh. After a long period of acclimating 'em to the new tank's water, I dumped 'em into their new home. So far they've all survived but I suspect I'll lose a good chunk of them as the ammonia levels continue to build and the cycling occurs.
So here's a picture of the guys in the bucket. The lighting wasn't great and there's some noise as a result, but you can see 'em kinda huddling together. The blurry tube in the pic is some air line hose I was using to slowly drip water from the new tank into the bucket so they could get used to it before going in.
I discovered this little fact about her past when, a while back, I spotted a whole lotta babie fish in the aquarium. I know that none of the current boys in there were the dad since all the babies looked just like their mother. None of 'em resembled even slightly either the red or the orange wag males. Female platys can keep fertilized eggs inside themselves in various stages of development for up to a year before giving birth.
I knew that all those babies were going to start putting a severe bioload on the tank when they started growing a bit, so I started setting up a 2nd aquarium. Just a 20 gallon, but it'd let me get the lil guys out of the big tank. Planning ahead, I put some extra media in the main tank's filter so that I could use it to seed the new tank and make it cycle faster. For whatever reason, that didnt' really help. The new tank just wasn't starting to cycle. The babies kept growing though and Saturday I ended up moving 'em to the new tank even though it's not ready. They were just getting too big to leave in the big tank any longer.
I transferred water from the big tank to a clean bucket then went about netting the babies and putting 'em in there. I'd never been able to get a proper count of the babies in the tank and figured there were about 10. After catching them all, the number turned out to be 13. Sheesh. After a long period of acclimating 'em to the new tank's water, I dumped 'em into their new home. So far they've all survived but I suspect I'll lose a good chunk of them as the ammonia levels continue to build and the cycling occurs.
So here's a picture of the guys in the bucket. The lighting wasn't great and there's some noise as a result, but you can see 'em kinda huddling together. The blurry tube in the pic is some air line hose I was using to slowly drip water from the new tank into the bucket so they could get used to it before going in.