One fine Sunday morning, I took my wife and kid for a walk down to our LFS ("local fish store" in aquarium-community lingo), to see if we can find anything there that would add some color to my fish tank. As of that time, my 20-gallon tank had five rosy barbs, four zebra danios, and one tuxedo platy (originally I had six of these and the danios, but a catastrophic CO2 surge killed off the other members of both schools--but that's a whole different story). The fish I had were colorful, but the tank as a whole needed an accent.
At the pet store, a tank full of red swordtails caught my eye, and I immediately thought of getting a pair. I had the store keeper net me a spirited male, and any female that gets caught along with it. I pictured the pair cruising along in my tank, like two lovers casually walking through Central Park. The last thing I counted on was for this pair to actually breed any time in the near future. But, man, was I dead wrong!
As a matter of standard procedure, on arriving home, I let the bag of swordtails float around in my tank for about 15-20 minutes, while I went off to prepare lunch for the family. Minutes later, my wife went into a frenzy, screaming, "the new fish is having babies!" like a looped audio track on full volume... "and they're EATING the babies!"
I had to act--fast! But hell, I didn't know a damn thing about breeding fish!
As fate would have it, I had, only a few days before, transferred my betta from the community tank to its own 1-gallon bowl, which was already set-up with its own filter, gravel and live plants. Needless to say, the betta bowl immediately got promoted to a breeding tank. Hastily I sent my betta back to the community tank, hand-transferred both adult swordtails into the aquarium, and gently let the fry out of the plastic bag and into the breeding tank. Sadly, this was not before the adult swordtails could gobble up all but four of their newborn fry.
But four is better than none. So once everything was in order, I jumped on the net for a crash course on raising swordtail fry. Fortunately, this species is relatively easy to breed and raise--apparently all the little swimmers need is good quality water with a gentle filtration system (either a sponge filter or an undergravel filter--my betta-bowl-turned-breeding-tank has the latter), and regular feedings of brine shrimp and algae pellets, and they'd be OK. I have no idea where to get algae pellets, but I had some sinking shrimp pellets in stock. So I took a handful of those, pulverized them and placed the powder in a small jar marked, "Fry Food".
The fry are now three days old and seem to be doing well; they're growing visibly by the day, on a diet of powdered shrimp pellets given three times a day. Internet sources say it'll take them about 3-4 months to mature, but I'm guessing, in about a month or two they'll be about the size of zebra danios, and it'll be safe to place them in the community tank.
Meanwhile, I thought I saw the two adults going at it again in my community tank--which means that in about 4-6 weeks I could have another swordtail birth in my hands. I've also read that female swordtails can give birth to as many as six broods from a single mating, so for all I know there could be more little swimmers growing in this babe's belly. Pretty exciting shit, huh?But I'm not gonna get ahead of myself here. For now, I'm happy to try my luck raising four little swordtails--and scouring the city's pet stores for a good deal on a breeding trap, just in case.
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