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- The best places to acquire a livebearer
- The gear you need to create the right environment for your livebearer
- Feeding and healthcare tips to prolong your livebearer’s life
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Meet the Livebearer
No group of fish has had a more significant impact on the tropical fish hobby than livebearers. Along with the well-known species, such as guppies, platies, swordtails, and mollies, common to pet shops there are more than 300 species of livebearers suitable to keep in an aquarium, with more species and selectively bred varieties entering the scientific and hobby communities every year.
Most livebearers are small, hardy, colorful, and peaceful fish, but there is a lot of room for variety among these pets. Some make excellent additions to community tanks, while others aren’t suited to life with other fish at all. Appearance can vary a great deal among the literally hundreds of species and thousands of varieties of livebearers, and even social behaviors and feeding styles can differ among them. Fortunately, care requirements for livebearers are generally fairly similar. Nonetheless, when choosing a livebearer to keep in your aquarium, you should research the species carefully to provide the best possible care for your fish.
What Is a Livebearer?
There’s no single order or family of fish that houses all livebearers. Livebearing fish are defined by their function (the bearing of live young rather than eggs), not by a shared evolutionary history or taxonomy. This makes this category of fish different from that of other popular fish groups, such as cichlids, barbs, or tetras, all of which share a common ancestry.
In general, any fish that possesses the following three distinct traits is a livebearer:
- Internal fertilization of female eggs by male sperm
- Internal fetal development
- Live birth of independent fry (juvenile fish offspring)
Known as vivipary, the livebearing method of reproduction serves to protect fertilized eggs from predators and to create larger and more well-developed fry.
Fancy and Wild-Type Livebearers
Livebearers for the aquarium hobby come in two basic forms: fancy and wild types.
- Fancy livebearers: These fish are the kind typically available in pet shops and at fish shows, and they have been either selectively cultivated over many generations or hybridized with other species or geographic races. The resulting fish have colors and finnage that are more elaborate and striking than those normally found in nature (where such a fish would be an easy target for a predator). Platies, swordtails, mollies, and guppies have all been “fancified” by dedicated hobbyists since the 1920s.
- Wild-type livebearers: Wild-type livebearers are descendants of wild specimens that were collected in nature and have not been selectively bred for color, size, or finnage. These fish behave and look more like their wild ancestors than fancy livebearers do. However, many of these wild-type fish have been bred in captivity for so many generations that they, too, have become domesticated to a degree.
| Text & Photos Copyright © 2007 TFH Publications, Inc. | Acknowledgments & Disclaimer |
