Guppies are although inexpensive, but they are fine and entertaining fish to keep in either pond or fish tank in your room. If you are a fan of guppies or love them, then you may have noticed that at some point, more than one female guppy will get pregnant. That’s if you have many of them. We all know that female pregnant guppy are separated from others, so, I have received questions from people asking if they can be able to keep or put 2 pregnant guppies in the same tank.
Can I put 2 pregnant guppies together? Yes, you can keep 2 pregnant guppies in the same tank, and separate them from the fry once they give birth with a mesh.
The main reason why pregnant guppies are separated from others is that other fish, including other guppies, will feed on the fry when they are born, but one interesting thing here is that even the mother too will eat her own fry.
However, the most dangerous predators are not other fish, but the parents.
By now, you may be wondering, if the mothers are the main predators of their babies, then how is it possible to keep 2 pregnant guppies together?.
Well, the simple answer to this is to keep them together and control them till they give birth.
There are 2 ways to protect the fry from their mother if you want to keep 2 pregnant guppies together.
Because the risk of doing this is, both the 2 mother guppies will collaborate and eat any of their babies they could get to.
To keep them together and still preserve the fry, you only need to do 2 things which are:
1) Separating the mothers from their babies:
This is the safest way of preserving the young guppies from their mothers.
It involves separating them from their mothers either in the same tank with mesh which you will have to buy or you relocate the mothers to another tank or their former tank.
With this strategy, the survival of the fry will be very high, as their mothers who are their greatest predators will no longer be able to eat them.
2) Keeping them in a heavily planted tank:
This is the second strategy to preserve the fry, especially when there are 2 mothers in the tank.
Although this strategy is effective, it doesn’t guarantee your baby guppies’ survival.
Baby guppies are very tiny, so keeping them in a highly planted tank with their mothers will go a long way to reduce the level of cannibalism from the mother guppies in the tank.
This is because the plants and caves will hide the fry and keep them from getting eaten by the mother guppies.
Although this strategy works, I honestly don’t recommend it, especially if you want to preserve as much fry as possible.
With this strategy, you could be able to keep 2 pregnant guppies together, but the only difference is, about more than half of the fry will be eaten by them.
When getting your tank planted, I would suggest a live plant like hornwort.
This particular plant may also provide some microorganisms for the fry to eat apart from protection.
So, you could keep 2 pregnant guppies together, but you will need to control them with the 2 methods I gave above to reduce the level of them preying on their offspring.
Can I Put Multiple Female Guppies Together?
Guppies are nice to keep, but knowing that they prey on their offspring, you may be wondering if you could keep 2 female guppies together.
Can I put 2 female guppies together? Yes, guppies are normally fine staying in groups than being alone. So you can keep any number of the females you want together.
Matured guppies are not known to harm themselves, both Males and Females.
So, if you love having them in large numbers, then you can keep as many of them as you like together because they pose no threat to themselves unless to their offspring.
Yes, you can put 2 female guppies together in the same tank and they will live very fine and peacefully.
When Can A Pregnant Guppy Be Put Into Breeding Box?
Once a guppy is pregnant, it should be separated from other fish and be kept alone, or with her fellow prospective mothers to avoid other fish eating the babies. The question here is when should that be.
When can a pregnant guppy be put in a breeding box? Once the guppy starts showing signs of delivery such as staying at the tank top, refusing to eat, and the belly getting so curvy and round.
The above are the commonest signs that a pregnant guppy fish is about to have her fry.
Try and relocate them to a breeding box where they will successfully have their babies peacefully.
Although you might choose to keep them separated, even before they start showing all these signs.
7 Reasons Why Your Pregnant Guppy Is Not Giving Birth
8 Possible Reasons Why Your Guppy Is Hiding And Not Eating
How Many Guppies Can You Have When Pregnant?
As we all know, it’s risky to keep pregnant guppies with others and other types of fish too.
How many guppies can you have when pregnant? You can have as many Pregnant guppies as you want, but for the fact, you could be able to keep their offspring safe from their mothers.
There is no particular number of these Pregnant fish you can’t have if you want, but there is a serious need to curtail the rate of cannibalism on the fry by controlling them.
Normally, I would suggest having not more than 3 pregnant guppies together, to easily curtail their rate of prey on their babies.
But if you could control many more, then go ahead and have as many as you want together.
