fry protection plants

[Sgooosh]

Hello! As my livebearers have turned into huge goliaths, less fry are surviving to adulthood. I'm wondering if plants would help to protect my fry or would I have to separate them?
and if plants do help, which ones should I get that can grow in medium light levels?

 

[Colin_T]

Plants help but ideally you want to separate the fry from the adults asap, especially if they are swordtails who eat their young. Most platies guppies and mollies don't but there's always an exception.

Water Sprite is good for fry to hide under. Java Moss can be good for them to hide but any well planted tank will offer more cover than a bare tank. The fry prefer to hang out under the surface, which is why I like Water Sprite. If there's no floating plants and the fry feel threatened, they go to the bottom and hide down there.

If you feed the adult fish 3-5 times a day when there are new fry in the tank, the adult fish will be less inclined to eating the young and you should have more time to get the babies out and put them somewhere else.

 

[GaryE]

A couple of tricks.
The first is ugly, but a dollar store topiary ball, spiky yet hollow with its fake plant exterior will save fry. They go in but adults don't like the spiky plastic.

Guppy grass is good cover.

Go out and find half a dozen golf ball sized rocks. Drop them around the bottom. Fry drop down as they uncoil, and that's when my adults would eat them. In a normal planted tank, fry that made the first 48 (I suddenly have an idea for a livebearer keeping trash TV show) survived. So bottom cover matters, and they get under the edges of rocks.