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Platy only given birth to a few fry

23 15:35:29

Question
I have bought 4 platy in the past week. I also have 2 Danio, 3 minnow, small catfish and a snail. Their all very healthy look but last night one of the platy gave birth but to only 5 fry. Is this normal? They have all been eaten, only because I didn't know she was pregnant. But now she looks as though she is ill and is staying at the bottom of the tank in a corner. And if you could give me any tips on what to do with a pegnant female as i believe two of the other platies are heavily pregnant after looking it up on a website.

Thank you, Abi

Answer
Abi, Thank you for your question.  Not knowing the parameters of the tank just leads me to speculate that you may have added too many fish at once when you added some very gravid platies especially if the tank is 10 gallons or under, so you may have yourself a slight ammonia spike on top of some very pregnant platies, who are more sensitive to conditions when it comes time to birth.  Especially since new babies can really spike ammonia and nitrate levels quickly.  Test the water for your parameters: PH, nitrate, ammonia, and hardness.  Try doing a 10% water change every other day, adding about a teaspoon of aquarium salt per gallon (or even table salt, although this really will cloud your water) You could add some floating plants to one side of the aquarium for the fry to hide in, the easiest way of doing this is taking some regular plants and taking off the base that weighs them down and just draping them on the top of the water on only one side of the aquarium.  This will come in handy especially if your other platies start to birth.  I hope I have helped out, let me know if you have any other questions, or if the condition seems to worsen.