Here little fishy, fishy

So last night was a ton of excitement in our house! Spirit got an aquarium for Christmas, but lost his first batch of fish to sickness. They started dying off one by one so we had to do a whole bleach cleaning treatment of the tank and equipment to kill off all the bacteria. We started over in early February with a new batch of fish and so far so good, we have kept all the fish alive.


Last night as I was putting clean sheets onto Lefty's bed (he is on the top bunk of the bed so I was crawling around on there, hitting my head on the ceiling repeatedly....ya I LOVE that job!) there was commotion below me with both boys, Mr. Man and eventually Lady Bug came running in also -- apparently one of the guppies was having babies. It looks like she is pooping and she has about 20 of them in a matter of minutes and then we see the other fish EATING THE BABIES..... nice! Guppies are "live bearers" which means she doesn't lay eggs, she actually gives birth to a little miniature version of herself and if not protected immediately they become a little snack for the other fish (well mom ate some too!). We didn't even know she was pregnant and wouldn't have known to protect her if we had known she was pregnant. I did a little Internet research to find out we should have moved momma to a different tank (called the "nursery") to have her babies and there are little hatchery things you can buy to protect babies. I also did some research to find out how to tell when a guppy is pregnant and found out that she can have babies every 2-3 months and even if we took out all males, the fish can store up sperm from a previous donor and continue having babies.

Ok, math isn't my forte but at 20 babies a pop, having them every 2-3 months..... THAT'S a lot of baby guppies. We managed to only save one poor little baby last night from the ravenous porkers in the tank, but I don't want a million guppies. I hate to leave them in there to be eaten, but I don't want all those little babies. What to do, what to do?!