odd question, 1 male swordtail, pregers: st, guppy, and molly?

**metal-otaku** · 06-18-2012, 07:23 PM

ok so the only male in my tank is a male swordtail.

my molly female is pregnant.
and my guppy female is pregnant.

molly could still be working on the stuff she got from the male molly that died. (assuming never found a body. not hard when i had 2 crayfish when he went missing. before the turtles ate one of the crayfish.)

the guppy however another story. this guppy is the only guppy in the tank. the only guppy that has ever been in this tank. when she was put in. she was a newborn. the only freaking newborn my turtles refused to eat in the old tank. they leave all larger fish alone. so i figured i'd keep it instead of feeding it to a guy at works turtles like i did with the others i had in the old tank. thinking either they will finally decided to eat it. or it will be a lone guppy and my lone crayfish will eat it. again not likely but wishful thinking as my crayfish is afraid of all the living fish. we have to hand feed her. she's a wuss.

what hadn't cross my mind is the swordtail knocking it up. is this even possible? or did it some how retain sperm from when it was a fry sized buggy? is that even possible? if it is a cross bread what they heck is it going look like? if my turtles don't eat all the babies. i got 2 fry i can see in the part of the crayfish's cave that she can't fit in to well anymore. yeah for meal worms! but i don't know where they are from. either molly/guppy/swordtail.

**dbosman** · 06-18-2012, 08:50 PM

Many things are possible. Particularly when a male lie bearer is with other female live bearers. DNA testing is what takes things from possible to proved.

Live bearers can store sperm for up to a year, that we know of. Guppies can be "hit" at a very young age, such as when she was in your turtle tank with other fish. The fry may prove interesting.
Good luck.

**Mountainlion63** · 06-20-2012, 10:57 PM

Unfortunately I don't think its possible. An organism can only reproduce with another organism that shares its genes (the first name in its scientific name) and even then there are a whole lot of exceptions. What probably happened was your female fish mated with some other in the store and is just becoming pregnant now. The same thing happened with my cherry barb which also had no other cherries(or anything else in its genes) but reproduced anyways. I don't know if all live bearers are in the same genes, but like dbosman said, if they are the fry would be very interesting.