Hello everyone,.
I have guppys and my females are always fat and pregnant. My best girl "Lucy" is the only one that I am able to kinda tell when she is going to give birth (she is my fav) and I put her in a fishy birthing room on the side of the inside of my tank. She is the only mama fish that seems to enjoy being in there. But any way.... Every time she has some babies, she also pushes out a few eggs as well. I have had her since the week after Christmas and this at least the 3rd time she had babies. The last time was about 3 weeks ago. She always is plump and she always has that dark spot on her tummy showing she is gravid. Can she simultaneously be carrying more than one "litter" of fry at a time? So at some point she could have babies that are ready and eggs that are not quite ready yet. The first two times she had babies only found maybe 2 eggs. This time there are 5 so far and we are only 8 baby guppy in to her labor. I feed them Nutrafin flack and all the fish seem to really enjoy the frog/tadpole bites that I put in for my ADF. Once a week I give brine shrimp and some times I even give them baby brine that I didn't feed to the fry in my fry tank.

I also have another question. My females are quite a bit larger than my males. My males are all small by comparison to my females, I bought a very pretty "guppy" about 4 weeks ago and it gets prettier as he grows. But I can tell he is a male and he keeps growing , he is almost 2x the size of any of my males. are there different kinds of guppys in different sizes? Could he be something else? He is getting they beautiful finage of a fancy guppy, he is just very BIG.

Thank you in advance
Tiffany

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Tiffany

Yes, female guppies can carry around eggs of different ages at the same time, and usually only the fry that are ready get "dropped" but it isn't at all unusual for a female to drop a few underdeveloped or undeveloped eggs at the end of a drop. There's really no point in trying to save these eggs (or underdeveloped fry) they won't continue developing outside the mom, unlike other fish eggs guppy eggs have evolved to require the nutrients and hormones and so on they are bathed in inside the mother's body.

The big male: Yes, there's quite a lot of variation among guppies. A selectively bred male from a well selected line will dwarf wild type males. He's got more "big" genes than they do. Unfortunately he will not necessarily breed more successfully, so if you want him to breed preferentially with the females, making sure he gets first shot at them after they drop fry (preferably within the first 5 to 7 days after the drop) will greatly increase his chances of being the father.

Last week I found 3 babies in the tank. I moved them to the small fry tank and two of the fry were connected, tummy to tummy. They were both trying to swim. They only lasted a few hours :(

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Tiffany

Ouch - that'll happen. Just like with human babies, except with guppies there's just nothing at all we can do.