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You have set up your tropical aquarium and have become efficient in maintaining your fish. Now you are looking to take things to the next level and get started with breeding. Fantastic, but first you need to decide on which kind of fish you will focus on breeding; live bearers or egg bearers.

Live bearers carry the babies to full term and give birth to live young, much like human mothers. But egg bearers will lay their eggs in the aquarium and the eggs will hatch when the minnow reach maturity. That is if they are not eaten first!

I would recommend starting out breeding live bearers, unless you already have extensive experience breeding tropical fish. Egg bearers are fairly complicated to breed and would require a lot more time and expertise, even then there is no guarantee of success.

One of the most important things to consider is keeping the baby fry away from the rest of the fish in your aquarium. Adult fish will only see the babies as tasty food and even the parents are likely to eat their own young, often as soon as they are born!

You don’t want your breeding efforts to go to waste so it is best not to tempt fate. Some young might survive if you have a lot of thick foliage in the aquarium, but it is much safer to use a special birthing tank. You will need to put the mother n there before she gives birth.

You can tell when the mother is close to giving birth because her abdomen will show a very dark black through her skin, and she will also be slightly swollen. Once the mother has given birth in the birthing trap she can be returned to the community tank. The young fry can then be left to grow in safety till they are big enough not to become dinner for the other fish.

Live bearers tend to breed easily and produce large amounts of young. Especially guppies, which are pregnant several times from one insemination.

We have barely scratched the surface of knowledge needed to successfully breed tropical fish. There is a wealth of information available on the topic and it should be a very rewarding learning curve for the beginner tropical breeder.

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