How can you tell a true virgin female

[toughchicken]

this may be of help -

http://www.fnzas.org.nz/fishroom/guppy- ... t7517.html

i only fed them BBS ocassionally some microworms if i run out of BBS. about 8 times day with only 25% water change per week. did not increase the temperature though.

i will try 5% water change daily see if theres any improvement.

just refering to the note of high water changes and feeding rates that shiuh was under taking. It may be of some help to hear of what he is doing.

We tried individual tank breeding and had similar problems, we ended up creating high vegetation in the main 80 L tank and they survived better, but this does not allow for specialised breeding that I presume you are wanting to do.

Anyway, feeding babies high quantities of food - much of it just goes to the bottom and then rots essentially poisoning the water quality - thus the need for frequent small water changes.

Dont know if this is helpful - but im sure you could pm someone live livebearer_breeder and ask questions and he maybe able to help you out seeing as he is dealing with it all the time (i guess)

[PENEJANE]

Cheers for that. At the moment my brine shrimp has been put on hold untill I can get a longer air hose as I have re aranged things but I got that today and hoping to get it up and going again but all they get is finely crushed flake at the moment and thanks to my two girls my origional baby food (F"N EXPENSIVE) ended up all over the floor with vicks vapo rub! not a good combo for the fishies.

I shall see how things go. I done a water change today so I will do another one on Monday

cheers

[PENEJANE]

Well I have lost all but a dozen fry to needle tail/pin tail. I went to my LFS and they gave me Malachite Green because it was the only thing that could be measured for a 20ltr tank. All the other meds were for about 80ltrs and had to be measured and since it was fry they said that it was harder again.

For the first week they will be fine but then over the following 2-4 weeks their tails thin out from a nice rounded C look to a < look and then their top and bottom fin (dausal and anal) clamp up against the body and basicly dissapear and then their scales start to stick out around the tail and about a day or two after that they look soo sick that I end up chucking them out. I have salted the tank and raised the temp to 27*C (even the bottle says 28*C)

So before I treated the tank with this stuff I then removed all thoes that look infected with what ever the hell the problem is and kept the ones that looked "normal". I will keep working with this Malachite Green stuff for a week or so and see what happens. I have got a female that is due to have babies anywhere between this weekend and next. I will keep them in the main tank untill I can be sure that they will be fine in the fry tank.

Any other suggestions as to what could be the problem or what I could try to fix it?

cheers