Errrmmm... a couple of months later and the tanks getting full of the Endless Little Buggers.
If anybody wants to rehome I'm based in North Manchester, drop me a DM please.
Meanwhile I'm off to Abyss in Stockport hunting down a Killifish or two. Do you have any recommendations
@dw1305 ? There seems to be a huge range of Killifish. Some getting rather large and agressive that will eat everything else in the tank as well. Harlequins, Corys, GPD, Emerald Danios, Pygmy Corys etc...
I don't approve of deliberately feeding live fish to other fish.
This used to happen, when I was a kid, in the now long forgotten not so 'swinging' 1960s, in my generally lovely friendly local tropical fish shop. My mother used to joke that she was born too early to enjoy the benefits of the contraceptive pill - not sure what that says about how 'wanted' I was!
Folks brought in poor colour quality guppies and they were tipped into a cichlid display tank, the large cichlids immediately went into hunter mode, the poor small fish, immediately went into potential prey mode, or was it pray mode! The guppies started darting about for their lives in a most distressing way, and I remember my mum was close to tears, and a little girl crying and pleading that her daddy had to do something. He daddy had actually brought the guppies into the shop. I believe this practice of public feeding of one live species to another is now illegal.
However, in most aquariums with egg layers the eggs get eaten by adult fish. In most tanks with live bearers most or all of the fry get eaten by adult fish. A shoal of any of the medium sized barbs will end the population explosion, but of course, they will eat fry of all other fish. But if you remove all the adult guppies and maintain a shoal of rosy barbs or tiger barbs for 3 months, the problem will be addressed relatively humanely and completely naturally. Fish eat other fish, in an aquarium it happens without us deliberately feeding one species to another, but it happens, in most aquariums, certainly if live bearers are present.
Two fish species which will almost always present birth control issues: guppies and kribensis. The latter seem to always lose their first batch, learn from their parenting mistakes and then raise 50 to 100 fry every couple of months. Kribs, they colour up fantastically when breeding and are pugnacious parents and a joy in some ways, but they should carry a birth control warning at the point of sale.
All live bearers have the potential to create a population explosion, though interestingly, my colony of red platy fish, is now I think genetically exhausted and is quite quickly declining, I started with half a dozen about a decade ago, used to take around 50 adults to the local tropical fish shop regularly, who were happy to have them, and had about 25 adults permanently resident, and who knows how many fry, for years, but now only a group of about a dozen mixed age/size fish seem to exist. Nature, 'red in tooth and claw' I fear in so many ways.
