Saturday, September 09, 2006

MY OTHER BABIES

Ok so first off, I am not a big "Fish" person- eating it or otherwise but CC has a huge 110 gallon tank which is in our basement. So, to try to get me into the spirit of the tank- which I hate because it is so fucken big, he allowed me to choose the fish that would go into it when we first set it up. So I chose fancy guppies- simple little fish, friendly and the males have beautiful flowing colorful tails. So anyway a couple of months after we had the fish in, I spotted a tiny baby fish and couldn't figure out where it came from. Well, I did some research and found that guppies procreate very easily and often and produce up to 25 fry at a time (that's fish talk don't ya know) so anyway I quickly named my baby fish Nemo because it seemed to be the sole survivor of what could have been 25 babies. Anyway, soon after, Nemo disappeared and it is still unknown whether he was sucked up the filter or eaten by another fish. Since then I have been able to monitor the female fish and figured out when they were about to give birth. I bought a birthing net (yes, I am officially a looser) and was able to get my pregnant fish into it and rescue the fry as she gave birth- the first 2 times I didn't see it happen and woke up the next day to find babies in the birthing net - and the last time I actually video taped the fish giving birth- it was pretty cool. So anyway the last big drop of fish came in May and I bought another small tank to keep all the babies in. So they have all been in the little tank since and oddly enough, there haven't been anymore births since then- none that I have been able to track anyway. So Today I transferred some of the bigger fry into the big tank- I now have 14 babies in the big tank and still 25 in the small tank and I must say I am rather impressed with all the colors coming out on them. Obviously we have no way of knowing which female mates with which male- so just in the past few weeks their colors have started to come out with some amazing results- much nicer than I had even hoped. And they are so so small when they are born and they are just all like see through eh, well, now we are getting some nice looking tail colours as well as some of them having beautiful colours on their bodies.. anyway I tried to take some pics of them, but between the glare of the flash, or being too dark, or too small or everyone fucken moving! (Stay still damn you all!) my pictures didn't turn out very well, I will select a couple and post them just so you can all see.. It's pretty cool. I'm now down to 3 males and 2 females of the original 14 total guppies like 4 months ago- but a couple got sick and some just perished under the stress of the fucken male fish chasing them around trying to get it on all the time.. Typical males... simma down na!!!

2 comments:

Patty said...

How cool! Maybe your next career should be in fish breeding. I have never had babies in the twenty plus years I have had various fish tanks. Maybe Canadian fish are more prolific? Maybe I just have no idea what I am seeing and so all the little ones parish. Sad to say, but as much as I do with my fish is try and remember to feed them once in a while and tell (my) Mister to get the dead ones out and flush them. Once upon a time I almost had a guy at the pet store refuse to sell me any of the fish because I didn't show enough reverence towards keeping them alive. Hope it isn't Karma that I come back as a fish, unless I can land in your tank!

Anonymous said...

HAHAHA - we are related! Call me when you start acting "the midwife" with the stupid little things! I used to breed the fancy guppies and one time the female had trouble birthing so I sat with tweezers (yes tweezers) and helped pull the little bastards out of her! I was very proud of my doctoring...everyone survived and was healthy...my roomates thought I'd lost my mind! Then a few months later we had a party and some of the drunken guests decided it would be fun to dare each other to EAT MY BABIES! AHHHHH! The inhumanity! Now I have only a Betta, no plans to get a female for him as the heartbreak is still too fresh (sniff sniff)!