Bringing home pregnant guppys

[kneeo]

My 2 blue guppy boys were getting lonely. They've been the only guppys in my 20 gallon tank that has mostly mollies. So I've been shopping around for some female guppys. Petsmart and Petco usually have a poor supply of females and the tank conditions usually dont look very good. However, yesterday I found a few guppys at PetCo for $1.49. So I bought 2, and the guy at the store said one of the them was pregnant. That was fine with me.

I have a QT tank set up. It's a 5 gallon tank with a 20 gallon filter. It's the only spare filter I have at the moment. I put the 2 females in there, and if they are fine after a week or 2, I will put them in my 20 gallon. Plus, I thought if the pregant one delivers, I can get the babies pretty easliy.

Well today, I came home from work and found 5 babies swimming around. http://www.fishforums.com/forum/imag.../icon_fish.gif
The trauma of being put in a new home, must have put the one into labor.

I caught 3 of the 5 babies and put them in a breeder net. They are so small that I thought I better check the filter. So, I unplugged the filter and found 4 more in there, and a dead one too.

So for $3 I ended up with 9 fish, plus Im wondering if there are more babies coming from either female.

I do want to keep a few of them and I have betta who loves baby mollys so Im sure he will like some guppys too.http://www.fishforums.com/forum/imag.../icon_wink.gif

[plasma19]

if i was in your situation i would move them both into the 20gallon and give them a week or a week and a half in there and by then you can tell if they are in need of isolation to give birth.

make sure you change your main tanks water by at least 25% every week for good results.

are all the guppy fry still alive and kickin?

best of luck.

[kneeo]

Well, Ive had some bad luck when bringing home some fish in the past and I didnt want to bring home some disease from the store. I recently purchased some dwarf pufferfish for my puffer tank and they had ICH, not fun with scaleless fish. 2 out of the 3 died.

The last time I bought some guppys the chick at petsmart used some water from a different tank and they brought ICH to my 20 gallon. If I had been more experienced then (a few months ago) I would have told her to forget it. I had a few fish die from that ICH incident.

So for cheap guppys I want to make sure they are healthy before putting them in my community tank. They pregancy/labor is secondary.

Only 1 fry died so far.