I am getting my fish tomorrow but i need to know if a fish is a male or a female.?

Question

i am getting fancy guppies,red wag swordtail,neon tetras,black mollies,cherry barbs,and some others.also how do u know if there mating.

Answer 1

you getting all opf them on 1 day.. i would spread it out over a few weeks and male guppies have longer prettyer tails... ask in the store because they mostly keep the males and females separate.. well in my lfs

Answer 2

I have to agree with the first answer, either fishless cycle it(Here is how- http://www.cichlid-forum.com/articles/fi... ) Or use 2 or 3 male guppies to cycle the tank with. With fish cycling the fish are your ammonis source. Another rule with livebearers is 1 male for ever 2 females. This is so the females will not be stressed by the male constanly chasing them, wanting to mate.Male guppies have long flowing fins while females have short ones. In swordtails, the males only have the swords on there tails. With mollies, the male will have a pointed anal fin and the female will have a fan shaped one. That is true with all livebearers, but the other ways with guppies and swordtails is much easyer to do thn look at the anal fin. With the tetras you listed, they will not usually spawn in a community aquariujm, you can set up a 10 gallon bare bottom sponge filtered fishless cycled tank and try and spawn them, just have a microworm culture on hand to feed the babies! But chances are you will not set up a spawning tank, so the livebeares are most likely the only ones to breed. With livebearers, the male puts his anal fin inside the female and it only takes a few seconds, you are most likly not going to witness this. Also, when you buy them from the pet store they are most likely already pregnant. Livebearer males and females are kept together in shipping and in some stores they are kept together in the selling tank, in others they are not, but females are almost always pregnant when you buy them. For a school of 6 of each of the schooling fish you listed, and 3(1 male and 2 female) livebearers each you need at least a....30 gallon, this leaves extra room for the fry to have. If you want 6 of each livebearer(2 males and 4 females) you would need about a 40 gallon breeder size tank. Good luck!

Answer 3

An associate can choose males from females for you. The guppies are usually separated by s*x anyway.

But so you can tell in the future-

http://habitatnews.nus.edu.sg/guidebooks...

This site illustrates the difference pretty well.

Answer 4

Any reputable fish store should be able to pick out the males and females for you.  The livebearers are very easy to s*x and the tetras probably won't breed in your tank anyway so it doesn't matter.

On another note, it isn't wise to add that many fish to a tank all at once. If the tank has already been through the nitrogen cycle and is ready for fish then adding a few at a time will keep it from going into a mini cycle again.  If it hasn't been cycled then you need to read up on that and get it going before you add any fish.  Even an established tank can't take adding a lot of fish at once.  You also need a very large tank for all those fish.

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