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Platy growth

Matt Havens

Member
Joined
22 Jun 2015
Messages
260
Has anyone else noticed with tank raised platys that they can take a long time to get to adult size?
I'm certain I had 2 lots of young 1 week apart at birth and the size difference was so obvious. After 2 years they were still not even half the size of their 1 week older siblings.

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About 6 months or so to get to a sellable size.

Never seen such a size difference before, but that sounds like a genetic trait, has the mother/father smaller? small gene pool?
 
About 6 months or so to get to a sellable size.

Never seen such a size difference before, but that sounds like a genetic trait, has the mother/father smaller? small gene pool?
I think you could be right. Some offspring were giving birth when they reached a 3rd the size of their parents. The trend seemed to carry on down the generation's so yes may well be genes

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Sometimes new blood (fishes) needed to help improve gene pool especially if sibling's are allowed to breed with siblings over extended time ( month's/years).
I currently have hi fin platy's and blue platy's and find the best growth for juveniles to be with several small feeding's a day with quality flake, and New life spectrum pellet for small fish.
Also freeze dried blood worm,alage wafer's.
 
Sometimes new blood (fishes) needed to help improve gene pool especially if sibling's are allowed to breed with siblings over extended time ( month's/years).
I currently have hi fin platy's and blue platy's and find the best growth for juveniles to be with several small feeding's a day with quality flake, and New life spectrum pellet for small fish.
Also freeze dried blood worm,alage wafer's.

This is simply crucial for all livebearer breeding, you have to have different lines, else your fish will just be deformed and dying young. This is a big thing for me, 10 years ago I had multiple guppy tanks, looking to breed out a certain trait (blackness), it was very difficult as whenever I would buy a pair, I'd have to trace their origin and who got them from who, to find similar fish to diversify them. Obviously for a store bought Platy, you could just find out their wholesaler, and find another store using another wholesaler (to be safe) but they're bred on such large scale, with genetic diversifying techniques that I'd be very surprised if all fish in a platy tank are related, but not shocked.

Anyway... for feeding up platys/mollies/guppies I used to drop one 12/14mm pellet of something, normally a fishing bait - and each tank would get one of these a day + live foods every other. The pellets would last all day, with fish nibbling at the surface layer(s) as it gets damper. This was more of a working set up, as opposed to a living room set up tho. I've never kept mollies or platys.
 
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