I think that most fish nowadays have been inbred and mishandled too much. If you inspect the most of the swordtails, mollies and guppies at stores nowadays, you'll find that they're much more fragile looking than they were a decade ago. I've seen many fish shops with those fishes just shimmying to keep afloat.

The kind of feeder guppies i've now (bought some recently) are feral and barbaric, they eat their & other young voraciously(they REALLY hunt for baby fish). My other livebearers don't do this. Plus the male feeder guppies lost the colour they once had. Can't find the nice little longkang fish I used to have that I've spawned in a horlicks bottle (didn't eat babies)

Anyway, quality fish are rare nowadays. I regret that i've given away some of the fish from my old line (I use to have hundreds of swordtails) and they died out because my dad transported all my fish into a different tank without asking me first. Water was not cycled and generally bad tank set up made most of everything die in a month plus. Imagine how irate I was when I returned from my holiday.

Well i'm starting a new brood from 3 great black molly specimens I bought (2 females, 1 male, were the only truly Jet black mollies in the tank at the shop) and same number of sunset platies. Plus some pretty old swordtails.

The platies gave birth to about 15 fries the other day in the nursery tank. Mollies also in the nursery tank gave birth to a about 10 fry (1 silver, a couple of speckled blacks, couple olive browns and ONE promising pure black) and i've spotted 1 baby swordtail about 1.5inch in the community tank (Babies don't survive very long in the community, the 1 swordtail survived by being sucked into the powerhead, grew in the filter and was sucked back into the tank.) I need more nursery tanks.

If you find good specimens of these livebearers, buy them, take good care of them, breed them and share them!

I would trade specimen for specimen for linebreeding and diversify the gene pool a little. PM me if interested. I'll post some pictures of my tanks and fishes when I get hold of a digi cam.

Yep, agreed Soyadude, once upon a time, 25 years back, my uncle use to keep bought 30-40 guppies with ease. We practically give it to our friends and they in turn, while saving enough money to buy a simple aquarium, will just put those guppies in a jar for weeks,... and you know what ??? they survived.

Nowadays, try to do that , those fishes goes kaput in a matter of 1-2 days.

What is the actual lifespan of these guppies ? How do we keep them alive? The sight of seeing them die ...is sad. Poor thing.

Inspite of that, I still keep a school of 7-15 guppies. Its a kind of nostalgia thing you know...

If there is someone out there who has these valuable info, please kindly share. ..

Bye, have a nice day guys

Dr.R