Fry As Fish Load?

[case1220]

Hi, I've just started keeping platy's ( a whole month now ) and I seem to have gotten pregnant platy's off the bat.

I've got a 20 gallon tank with 6 adult platy's...... now I have a tank devider with about 36 fry on one side ( more or less, hard to count and they seem to keep coming)

Do fry count as fish load and if so at what point am I in trouble?

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome Case1220. The simple answer is yes fry count as fish load. When newborn, the fry are not much fish load but as they start to grow they become eventually the same load as the parents. If you are feeding fry heavily to make them grow better, it becomes a case of them presenting more load than their size would imply.
A good way to think of fish load is to ignore the fish appearance itself and look at how much food you put in. Eventually that food becomes waste and is the real load. If your 36 fry are getting as much food as the 6 adults, they are about the same fish load as the adults. In this case 1 fry would be the same as 1/6 of an adult. If you feed them 4 times a day as much as the adults get once a day, the equation for each fry comes out to the fry being 2/3 the value compared to the adult. I don't know what is going on in your tank so can't give you a good fraction to use but the fry are a biological load of some amount.