This Week's Critter Post

The last couple of weeks, I've been doing a Saturday post having to do with animals. No pictures this week, seeing as the stars are guppies. Aka rainbow piranha. Aka the model after which mice and rabbits are weakly patterned.



Now with guppies, the problem is how to keep them from breeding in captivity. Well, due to the fact that they will eat their own young, this hadn't been an issue for the last several months. If they were egg-layers, like the catfish, instead of live-bearers, there would never be a guppy that survived to hatch. We had a few juveniles in the tank, which weren't big enough to eat the babies on their own, but were small enough to go into the plants and flush them into the adults waiting jaws. Imagine if your parents and older siblings were cooperating in hunting you when you were an infant. Result: 100 percent consumption over a period of three months or so, and now the juveniles were fully grown.



Well, we have pretty guppies. We want them to have a few babies that survive. So I dropped two more plants into the tank sometime in mid December. I just did the first partial water change since then. Flushed at least twenty fodder and survivor sized babies out into the open (Baby guppies go from eyes to fodder to survivors, then juveniles). That is a rate that's just too high, large tank or not. Given the size of the tank, we're fine if we don't get any more, but we want a full spread of ages so that we never have a catastrophic die off without replacements. So I took one of the plants out and moved the remaining ones further apart, and resigned myself to taking a few to the one store in town that will accept them when they're mature enough (for resale as fancies, not feeders). They're pretty fish, but there is a limit to how many a tank will support.