After a looooong morning of therapy, I'm now taking a short break, and watching the platy fish in one of my tanks. I unwittingly bought a mating pair. After fretting that one of them was blowing up like a small balloon, it finally occurred to me she could be pregnant. This meant asking google how to tell male and female apart, which led to learning how to identify the platy penis. Or, as one fish-wit put it, "once you see it, you'll never forget how it looks." Oh so sadly true. I'll never be able to look at a male platy again without smirking.
Sexing fish is still better than conducting some necessary scatalogical research when I first got them and learning everything anyone could ever possibly want to know about platy poo. Fascinating facts, like the platy is prone to constipation and stringy poo, and that platy poo is the same color as its last meal.
Anyway, the female has been slowly releasing her fry. Tiny and translucent, their heads are all eye. They are now darting among the other tiny critters that inhabit the low regions of the platy tank: a colony of dwarf shrimp and a handful of pygmy catfish, all of them happily munching on invisible organisms.
It's delightful to watch, but likely a short-lived pleasure. Platy eat their young, and Mom is already snooping around their hidey-holes for snacks. It's the naturally cruel order of things and like the voyeur I am, I'm just going to watch.
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