Q&A for How to Breed Fish

You can keep it, but the other fish might pick on it, or it might not be strong enough to survive and might die. A good option would be to buy a small tank (but big enough for the fish's comfort) and keep it in there. Keep an eye on it, though.

No, they will die. The temperature range for livebearers is 18–29 C.

You don't need to, but if you breed for profit, you wouldn't make any money if you can't sell fish or if your reputation is damaged. With ugly fish, you can't breed them and make more ugly fish, so you could give them away or cull them. There are ways to cull them without being too cruel.

It will take about a week or so. It depends on the type of fish you have. Smaller fish take about 5 days and bigger fish take about 7 days.

Leave them in there till they are like miniature adults, free swimming, and big enough to not be eaten or lost, and they're on hard food.

Because it happens in the wild and your fish's instinct is to find food. If the fry are in the tank and not in the wild, they have no place to swim away from the mother. You'll have to use a net to move the mother or the fry into a different tank (acclimate them first).

Either a ten- or twenty-gallon tank is a good size for a spawning setup unless you are handling very large fish. Too big a tank makes it difficult to monitor everything that is going on, and it is easy to lose track of spawners and fry. 2.5 gallons may be too small.

You can separate them to prevent them from eating one another. Or else, you will be very sad.

Yes! If they just hatched, they can survive on their yolk sac for a few days. You can always buy fry food, or use watered down cooked egg yolk.

Guppies, mollies, and platys are so closely related that they can interbreed. As of now, my Endler's guppy is breeding with my rainbow platy, so I'll be expecting some colorful babies.

Yes. Since they are the same species they can breed fertile offspring. Any type of goldfish can breed with another type of goldfish. Check out How to Breed Goldfish for tips on breeding.

It could possibly be a goldfish. But, the best thing to do to make sure what type of species your fish is, take it to a pet shop and ask someone who specializes in fish.

Look at the color. For most varieties of goldfish, a bronze or brown coloring may indicate that it is under a year old. If it has a gold metallic coloration, it is probably an adult between one or two and ten years of age.

You can either set up another tank for the fry or leave it in the same tank. This will control the population as the adults will eat many of the babies and only a few will survive.

They will happily eat baby brine shrimp but the easiest thing to feed them would be crushed flakes.

Fish farming (or pisciculture) has to do with raising fish for food and is different from aquaculture (the farming of aquatic animals such as fish, crustaceans, etc.). A fish hatchery is a combination of a lab and a farm, where fish and shellfish are spawned, hatched and taken care of. Globally, the most notable fish species produced in fish farming are salmon, catfish and carp.