Guppies

[farla]

Mom bought a bunch of guppies as part of stocking a new tank. We got six, so they wouldn't bully any one guppy too much, and two of each variety, so they'd have a friend. But it turns out the guppies formed into pairs and one of each variety bullied the other. (And in each case it was the smaller one. One of the pairs had a particular big gap, with the larger one twice the size and with a magnificent tail, and he was being chased about by the tiny shrimp with the pathetic tail.) We just got through rearranging the tanks to split them up.

I really wonder why. I'm thinking it might be that because they came from the same tank they already had an established pecking order, or else that perhaps guppies are more aggressive to similarly colored guppies.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I apologise if this is super obvious and you've already considered and rejected it, but you can tell male guppies from females pretty easily, right? The females are generally larger than the males (sometimes over twice their size) and tend to be less colourful. The males have a thin, backwards-pointing anal fin.

If you're having trouble with the smaller guppies bullying the bigger ones, and you aren't sure of their sexes, it's probably that the male guppies are trying to rape the females.

When I first got guppies, the guy at the pet store told me I should get at least two females per male, otherwise the males would just rape the females to death or something horrible like that. And I just got all females because that is horrific. And then I learned that guppies store sperm, so they gave birth to a whole bunch of rape baby guppies of both sexes. And then when all the cute baby guppies grew up, the males proceeded to rape their mothers, aunts and sisters.

Ovoviviparous fish are the ducks of the fish world. D:

[farla.livejournal.com]

Oh, they're all boys (although I do wonder if the little one chasing the bigger one was a bit confused about that). I insisted on only boys because of the whole harassment and rape thing, but they just do it to each other... I need to change the policy to no terrible fish species at all.