Which livebearer is easiest to breed and maintain?

[Paul_MTS]

I'm planning on some guppies to put in with my red claw crabs when I get the tank set up after my holiday.

Will I need to do anything to get them breeding as the fry would supply a nice snack for the crabs!! My LFS dude suggested them as they swim from middle to high in the tank so would be out of reach from the crabs.

It will be a 3 gallon tank with a UGF i'll get some bog wood in there and make a cave, probable a live plant aswell for the guppies to mingle in!!

Will 2 be fine to get breeding or a few more?

 

[wolfie33]

IMO guppy's are very easy to breed as are all livebearers.possibly with the exception of swordtails who eat there fry unless you can monitor the birth.
platties are very easy bordering on impossible not to have success.

A friend of mine tried to supply an ifs with mollies about 10 year ago and found that the most succesful way of doing this is to leave a tank in an isolated room in direct sunlight for about 3 months untill a huge algae build up occured then added 3 pairs of black mollies along with some salt and plenty of fine leaved plants(artificial) and then covered the tank. 3 more months later the tank was full of fry of various size.
That is the way he did it and untill recently it continued to work well.

But i guess that takes the fun out of the voyerism of watching the fish give birth.

So on that score i'd have to say mollies are as easy as guppy's

 

[marjst]

I've always had a lot of luck with platies, swords, and even bettas. For some reason though I've never had any luck with guppies. No babies and the adults don't last long. With the former, every time I've kept a pair, it wasn't long before I'm practically overrun with little ones.
Lots of luck to you.

 

[Xavier]

I'd say mollies. it's like every minute they're pregnant. platies i'd say are the hardest to raise because their young is the smallest of all the livebearer fry, truly.