Wheres The Babies

I've had my platys for about 3-4 months and they haven't spawned. Well i think they only spawned once as i saw one fry about 2 months ago. i have guppies in the tank too. but i have plant for the fry to hide in. maybe not enough though. i feed them flakes and, brinshrimp and tubifex worms every so often but still no fry.

Can you put up a picture of your plant cover? My own guess is simple. Many people think of plants as gardeners might while a good fry cover is more a thicket than an attractive clump of plants. If you don't have guppy fry surviving by the dozens, your cover is not dense enough to see many platies. Platy fry are rather small compared to guppies.

Plus any babies that are likely to survive in a community tank WONT be seen for a good long while. Afterall the only way they will survive is by being very good at hiding.

Yah i don't think i have enough cover i might go and get some java moss and let it spread with that i should start to see babies right?

By my standards, you have absolutely no cover Mystus. This is a lightly covered tank that allows tons of guppy fry to survive to adulthood. A similarly covered tank would see you having lots of platy survivors.


Another tank with reasonably good cover from Elodea instead of java moss.


Yet another way of providing adequate livebearer cover


I tend to favor the java moss approach but all of these tanks end up with good livebearer survival rates. Another plant similar in its cover ability to java moss but a bit less algae looking is najas grass. The najas grass is something rather new to my tanks but I may let it completely replace java moss as a main cover plant. It is a bit more open than java moss but provides essentially the same quality of cover and is no more trouble to maintain and propagate. So far it seems less likely to have a build up of hair algae remove its usefulness.

I have anacharis that are in other tanks but when i try to put them in this tank they just die i think it is because the filter moves them around alot. do you know if i could slow the filter down anyway? its an eclipse 1.

Anacharis is one of the plants that I think of as requiring lots of light Mystis. Although you nay do well with moderate light on a tank with Anacharis, you will want to try using Anacharis as a mainstay of your tank. I have some tanks that have mainly Anacharis as the cover crop and they are doing fine. In my tanks, the cover crop of plants is something that definitely gets my attention when a new listing of water chemistry arrives for my analysis.