How Long Till They Spawn?

hey guys ive got these two fish one is a guppy and the other is a platy and they are both pregnant. but heres the bad thing i dont know how long till they give birth i got a female platy yesterday and it gave birth that night but i want there so the babies died . but since i really want baby fish i went and got the most prgnant platy in the shop hoping that she would give birth tonight as i have school tomorro so i got some pics and i was hoping if you could tell me how long tell the platy gives birth. im not as woried about the guppy but if u could help with that to it would be great!

ps the two platy pics are of the same platy
and sorry bout them being blury or anything like that im not the best photographer!

The Guppy look pretty pregnant. The Platy doesn't look noticeably pregnant. Four weeks is the full gestation period normally.

I would say both within the next few days. My gups like to drop overnight though, so I almost miss the bus because it takes so long to catch em all.

so you would say from tuesday to sunday hopfully?

It can be very hard to tell. Generally guppies are the easiest to know. That photo looks pretty big, I'd say five days or so. See the dark spot on her flank? That's the fry's eyes developing inside her. That's the easiest early indicator of pregnancy, and when the eye spot is that dark and her belly that swollen, she's pretty pregnant.
Incidentally, it's not smart to buy extremely pregnant fish because the stress of being moved can often cause them to abort the fry. Goldie aborted not long after I bought her because she was so big. I learned my lesson and I left the most BEAUTIFUL platy I have EVER seen in the pet shop on Thursday because she looked like she'd swallowed a marble and I didn't want to bring her home in that condition. I'm going back to buy her and a molly I've got my eye on hopefully tomorrow.

The platy is a lot harder to tell, the eye spot is usually faint, rarely reliable, and sometimes not present in medium-coloured fish like yours. I'd say that she's pregnant, but platies are usually almost that round. Two to three weeks from when the photo was taken is my best guess, but it's not easy to tell. Minstrel was gigantic, and I'd wake up each morning and look in the tank and say, 'today's the day, she's dropping today' and get home to a swollen fish and no fry. That went on for six days before she dropped them. Thirty-six, not a stingy batch from a young fish.

Hi,

Yes, what Laura says is right, you should avoid heavily pregnant females in shops cos more than likely the stress of being moved will make them abort.

Incidentally, do you know your guppy has a big chunk out her dorsal fin? Keep an eye on that.

My platy has the same problem. I had to make a really difficult decision to give away one of my mollies because 'she' was actually a juvenile male, and when removed from the mature males in the pet shop tanks became territorial and quite aggressive. I don't know why he attacked the platy, but my male platy is missing half his dorsal fin and a bit of his tail and the female molly was harassed no end.

If you want to fix that, up the salt dosage. My tank is full of livebearers which like there to be a bit of salt in the water, and I usually use 1/2 gram/litre, but to fix up the rips in the dorsal fin I'm putting it up to 1 gram/litre. You can't use table salt, it's special marine salt you buy from your lfs. Livebearers are healthier if there's a tiny bit of salt in the water all the time, but you can push it up like I have when there are fungal diseases or open wounds.

hi thnx for yor advise and when i got the female guppy from the pet shop she had the chunk missing from her fin and the man in the pet shop said that it was from one of the other fish in the tank i forgot what he said it was and i still havent had any babies yet lol