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4 Month Old Swordtails Still Not Showing Sex

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memphis343

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Hello all.
I have a batch of four or five month old velvet swordtails that are on average 1/2" in length and a couple are even 1" and they all look the same. None of them show any type of sword at all. any ideas? I only began to really think this was strange because I recently recieved a few fish from a friend that did not want them anymore and two of them are some type of swordtail but they are both much smaller than most of my babies and they have a long black sword. They are not velvets but other than color they look like my babies.
I have the babies in a 10 gallon tank with a sponge filter. I have been feeding them brine shrimp eggs, baby brine shrimp, bloodworms and some tropical flakes. (mostly the brine shrimp eggs).
I have included some pics. the larger picture are two of the babies I have added to my community tank and the smaller one are the remaining 15 - 20 babies in the 10g.
Ignore the feeder guppies, they were food but then the fish died before I had the chance to feed them.
any input will be nice.
Thanks,
Jeff
 

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I could sex my gups at 2 months, where 1 male had a gonopodium and the rest are females. From what I understand, the majority of the fry are usually females.
The 2 in the large pic are females, but I'm not so sure about the others.
 
Thank you for your fast responses.
I have had livebearers for years and have never had a problem telling the difference between the two. but I have not had a lot of fry. Is it possable to have all females? I am sure the larger ones are all female and I am pretty sure the rest of them are too. I just think its odd to have no males. I have a total of 18 (I just counted them all) healthy small fish that all seem to be female.

Another oddity: I bought 6 feeder guppies and the fish I planed to feed them to died so I still have them all. I kept one of them with my fry because it was so small i knew the other fish would eat it. The other five that were at twice it's size I put onto my community tank. All the guppies I put into the comunity tank turned out to be males and the one I left in with the swordtail fry is a female.

Thanks again everyone.
 
The presence of one mature male may slow the development of other males, but four months is too long to not see the genotype expressed. I would say you have all female survivors in this batch.
 
theotheragentm said:
The presence of one mature male may slow the development of other males, but four months is too long to not see the genotype expressed. I would say you have all female survivors in this batch.
Click to expand...

You may have all females which is often happens in Swordtails, or you may have an alpha male developing which is slowing the development of the other fish however, Swordtails are notoriously inconsistent in the age at which they sex out anyway and you may have fish a year old which look like females and then start to sex out.

This is why there is some confusion as to whether swordtails change sex or not, because apparently viable females suddenly change into males.

Temperature can also have an effect on the development of all livebearers, I have found that cold temperatures lead to mainly males and warm temperatures lead to mainly females. If you are worried you could try lowering the temperature for the next brood.

The thing is that you should just not panic; the fact that you are getting them to breed means that you are giving them whatever they want; normally more problems are caused by panicking and fussing around your fish than leaving them to their own devices so my advice would be to sit tight.

dunchp said:
theotheragentm said:
The presence of one mature male may slow the development of other males, but four months is too long to not see the genotype expressed. I would say you have all female survivors in this batch.
Click to expand...

You may have all females which is often happens in Swordtails, or you may have an alpha male developing which is slowing the development of the other fish however, Swordtails are notoriously inconsistent in the age at which they sex out anyway and you may have fish a year old which look like females and then start to sex out.

This is why there is some confusion as to whether swordtails change sex or not, because apparently viable females suddenly change into males.

Temperature can also have an effect on the development of all livebearers, I have found that cold temperatures lead to mainly males and warm temperatures lead to mainly females. This could explain the sex split in the guppies if the temperatures are different in the various tanks. If you are worried you could try lowering the temperature for the next brood.

The thing is that you should just not panic; the fact that you are getting them to breed means that you are giving them whatever they want; normally more problems are caused by panicking and fussing around your fish than leaving them to their own devices so my advice would be to sit tight.
Click to expand...
 
I have 15 platys which are 4 months old and I only have 2 males out of them.
 
This is great information for me.
Thank you all.
I will just wait and see what happens. They all seem very healthy and happy. I have three of them in the community tank and they are at least twice the size as the rest. The community tank has a lot of fish and live plants. I think that make a difference.
Thanks again everyone.
 
Hi,
I have had a sim8ilar situation, but in my case I have put it down to platies crosssbreeding with te swordtails which can lead to many different things including producing only females. Mine may not even be fertile. Not your problem though as they are not cross breeding.
Alison
 
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