Kari and I recently added to our fish family with 5 Platies (Xiphophorus maculatus [pic and details]). They’re bright colored goldfish-like critters, than like to hang out together and are livebearing fishes. That last part is key. I minsunderstood the pet store guy who said Swordtails (Xiphophorus hellerii [pic, no details]) are “male Platies.” While they’re similar to Platies (and the males are the ones with the sword tails), a male Platy does not have a sword tail. Shoot. Well, we brought home what we thought were a bunch of girl fish (we even call them “the girls”), and now one’s pregnant: evidently we have at least one male in that mix, and they had some little fishy “bow chika bow bow” in the dark corner of the crab’s cave (sounds dangerous to me).

The real problem here is that Platies give birth to between 10 and 100 young, and have a tendancy to eat their babies (yeah, I know they’re called “fry,” bite me) after giving birth. Our filter’s also not ready for babies, and there’s Gouramis and a Betta in the tank too, and I think they will be prone to devour the baby Platies. My attitude has always been “they’re just fish,” but now that they’re baby fish I’m having this huge moral quandary. On one hand nature is cruel, and the other fish would have an honest shot at eating the babies in the wild; on the other hand they’re babies for goodness’ sake!

I need your help, as a faithful reader of my blog (hi mom). Should I try to protect and raise the fry, or let nature run it’s course? If I choose option 2 (nature) should I get the tank ready for nature by putting a screen over the filter inlet? Vote below

[poll id="2"]

UPDATE: DARN IT ALL! Turns out we have 2 boys and 3 girls! Oh noes! Apparently you can sex Platies fairly easily: a male Platy has a skinny anal fin and a female Platy has a fanned anal fin. It might be my imagination, but I think I can already see the darkening spot above her anal fin that would be the fry’s eyes. I might be taking the boys back to the pet store to avoid this problem in the future…