Freshwater fish that constantly have babies

[skang808]

What type of fish should I put in my tank that will always have babies. I have a 30 gallon tank and I want to start off with a small fish and have baby ones later and just keep going. Please give me some ideas thank you.

 

[Mattfinn]

Livebearers are your best and easiest choice. Guppys, Mollys, platys, endlers, swordtails.

 

[skang808]

Which one of those has the most? And more often?

 

[Mattfinn]

They're all prolific breeders...

The rate of births will depend on water quality, diet and overall care.

 

[blueramboy87]

Guppies will have babies like crazy.

 

[TMRC Exotics]

+1 on guppies. Endlers or fancy.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Aquarium Advice mobile app

 

[livefishguy124]

our modern day guppy is a result of inbreeding, meaning that they have colors in abundance not seen in nature, but with a side effect, they are week and will commonly die during/after birth. but i favor the mollies and platys, but there is also the marbled crayfish, which is self cloning meaning you only need one, i hade one for a month, and now i have a few hundred fry in my tank with her.

 

[TheresaM]

Heterandria formosa, hardy and prolific.

 

[Andy Sager]

As previously mentioned, today's livebearers are a product of generations of selective breeding so if you want to keep the lines " true", you can not just let the fish in your tank constantly breed with each other **. If this is not an issue for you, then raising any of the fry will be greatly effected by how well they can be protected in the tank as well as how well they are cared for.
If this is an issue, you will want to remove all of one gender of the fry so that you don;t get brother to sister breeding. Breeding parent to child will help maintain the line as it currently exists ( and is the first step of how new strains are created. ).

** An example of this happened to me back in the 1960s. My Dad bought me a trio of the "New Delta Tail" Honell Guppies. Since I was just getting into genetics, I wasn't as aware of all that was involved in creating this fish. Long story short, I set them up in a tank with live plants and other than doing water changes and feeding, I didn't pay much attention to them as I was now breeding egglayers. A couple years later, I went to harvest some of the plants and couldn't find one Delta tail in the tank. It was loaded with Guppies but they had all turned back into their wild form. (Nothing like those "exotic" deltas. ) This will eventually happen to all livebearers if left unchecked long enough.

Hope this helps.

 

[TheresaM]

Question for OP: is there a particular reason you're looking for so many fry?

 

[livefishguy124]

Question for OP: is there a particular reason you're looking for so many fry?

he wants to keep a colony, that will keep breeding so he wont have to buy fish

 

[TheresaM]

he wants to keep a colony, that will keep breeding so he wont have to buy fish

But depending on the tank setup and what type of fish he chooses it could get overstocked rather quickly.