Different colored guppy fry?

Hello! I’m pretty sure I’m just being paranoid, but still better safe than sorry. I had a female guppy that was really struggling in her labor. She was pregnant when I bought her, and a week into her quarantine the water started developing ammonia problems that I didn’t notice right away. She was breathing heavily and swimming at the top of the tank not moving and I thought it was labor. Took a couple days for me to notice, but when I did I made sure to fix it. She held her fry in for 3 more weeks. Meaning she was probably pregnant for almost two months. I moved her to the main tank and it only took a couple days there before she popped out a couple every couple hours every day for a week. The total fry count was 23 but I only managed to safely extract 20, the rest became snacks unfortunately.

Those fry are about a week to two weeks old now, all seem healthy. The female guppy seemed to have developed a permanent tail injury, her tail is droopy now and she still kinda swims funny, but she’s still very alive and still comes for food.

anyway to the topic. Out of her 20 fry, some of them are SUPER dark. This is only my 2nd fry group, but a noticeable number of them are dark grey verses the colorless pale. A couple of them have already started forming dark spots on their tails, much faster than my first group.

I’m pretty sure this is just genetics but I wanted to make sure. Also worthy to note the tank is now cycled. The first fry group came a couple weeks earlier than expected so my fry tank wasnt completely cycled when the first group of fry went in (all of them survived, are in the main tank, healthy, and have lovely splashes of color coming in).

they could also be from different ladies, bc it took a week. But the one female is the only one that looks noticeably smaller. The rest look the absolute same so I think they are all hers and she’s just struggling because of the ammonia issue I missed

Here’s a picture of the mother, the new different colored fry, and one of my especially vibrant older guppies from my first batch

Since no ones replied I’m just gonna assume genetics

biofish said:

Since no ones replied I’m just gonna assume genetics

Click to expand...

I'm sorry you didn't get a response, sometimes it depends how many members are online and when, or if there's an emergency, that can lead to threads not being seen! Always worth bumping like this if no one has answered in a day or two A lot of us members are in the UK and Europe too, so the timezone difference can lead to threads being missed.

About the two different coloured fry coming from the same batch, can totally happen! Female guppies store sperm from the males they've mated with, and can often fertilise one batch of eggs using two different males sperm. I would guess that your fry likely have the same mother (if you only saw one female heavily gravid, and the fry all look the same size) but two different dads Half-siblings, born at the same time. Nature is awesome!

When I started breeding my guppies, I was breeding ones born with grey bodies, eventually developing blues n their tails and fins. I love blue fish and shrimp, so I naturally started with blues, and all my fry had grey bodies. My females all looked similar to this momma;



After a year or so, I bought this female platinum blonde delta guppy, and the yellow snakeskin cobra male in the following pic. These guys both have yellow as their base body colour, so the fry they produce have yellow bodies when first born.



Since I had them all colony breeding together, the grey adult females carried sperm from the yellow snakeskin male as well as they grey bodied males they'd already mated with before, and the platinum girl carried sperm from both too. So I began having having batches of fry that were roughly a 50/50 mix of grey and yellow fry, clearly a mixture of fry from both fathers.

Also @emeraldking , our resident livebearer authority, just had a thread recently about a type of guppy he keeps where it's essential to keep the grey and yellow bodied lines together, in order to preserve the body patterns, it's really cool! Check it out here!

https://www.fishforums.net/threads/high-end-ritz-guppies.470879/#post-4095533

He's the one to ask about guppy genetics, super knowledgeable

The problem with the more interesting questions is that some of us lack the knowledge and are patiently waiting for someone with more brains to answer...

biofish said:

Hello! I’m pretty sure I’m just being paranoid, but still better safe than sorry. I had a female guppy that was really struggling in her labor. She was pregnant when I bought her, and a week into her quarantine the water started developing ammonia problems that I didn’t notice right away. She was breathing heavily and swimming at the top of the tank not moving and I thought it was labor. Took a couple days for me to notice, but when I did I made sure to fix it. She held her fry in for 3 more weeks. Meaning she was probably pregnant for almost two months. I moved her to the main tank and it only took a couple days there before she popped out a couple every couple hours every day for a week. The total fry count was 23 but I only managed to safely extract 20, the rest became snacks unfortunately.

Those fry are about a week to two weeks old now, all seem healthy. The female guppy seemed to have developed a permanent tail injury, her tail is droopy now and she still kinda swims funny, but she’s still very alive and still comes for food.

Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about your female, I do see what you mean.
Labour is a tough thing for any animal to go through, including fish, and especially if it's an older female. Things can easily go wrong and cause issues, especially if you've been struggling with cycling/ammonia stuff too. But it could just be one of those things that happen sometimes, since things can go wrong in labour and cause some internal damage.

Nothing you can do about that, except keep the tank as well as you can, and hope for the best for her! I had a female, Violet, who went through a terrible labour. Her 5th or 6th batch, huge healthy female in lovely water conditions, but something must have gone wrong, because I found the 30-40 fry, and her tail was drooped like that too. She was swimming weakly, and I could see some internal bleeding. Really thought she was going to die, and sometimes females do die in labour or shortly after.

But she recovered remarkably well! The tail droop remained, her swimming was weaker than before, but not alarmingly weak, and she never had another batch (thankfully, because I doubt she would have survived another) but she did survive and live for another six months or so. Just meant she retired and lived out the rest of her life with the colony.

As already mentioned by AdoraBelle Dearheart, guppies belong to the ovoviviparous livebearers. Most of such kind of livebearers, the females have the ability to store sperm packets in the folds of their fallopian tube. If a female has mated with more than one male, a new batch of newborns can be fathered by more than one male. Which makes the outcome of phenotype of the new fry variable. But also if the female herself is from mixed blood, the outcome of the fry can still be a surprise. This goes also for the potential fathers. If one knows the genetics of both parents, it would be easier to determine how the phenotypical outcome of the offspring will be.

Sorry, but even I haven't noticed this topic before... And yes, the time difference at the places where everyone lives can cause that certain topics are overseen.

Thank you everyone! I didn’t mean to come off as short or impatient in my last comment. Since all the babies are growing absurdly quickly and well, I wasn’t too worried. More curious~ I suppose I could’ve worded that better

But I didn’t know fish could have a mixed batch with several fathers! I knew about the sperm pouch but it’s absolutely fascinating to know multiple fathers were possible!! That actually is gonna make me reevaluate my breeding plans lololololol. I’m trying to keep track of who I’m breeding to avoid inbreeding. Also those uploaded guppy pictures are absolutely lovely!

I have some drastically different colored guppies to breed so I’m super excited to see what color fry I get!