Sexing fish

[beermanic]

How long before guppies can be sexed? My babies are about 1 month old and they all look like females. How can this be? I have about 8 babies and they all appear to be females because I see no colors on any of them and they don't appear to have any finnage to them. The father is very colorful and all the females have beautiful big tails with black pokadots.

Maybe the males all became lunch because they are in a well planted tank allowed to survive naturaly by the thick cover. When they first were born I found the baby school to be around 8 and doesn't appear to have lost any but where are all the males. Maybe I need to wait a bit for the colors to develop.

If they are all females I will have about 12 females and 1 male. (Lucky guy) Unfortunately the male is not even the father. I just got him because I lost the male right when the babies were born. I did something kind of stupid, I put them in a tank with a betta. I didn't know that the betta and male guppy would fight. I have never had problems in the past with betta aggression with other species. After being together for about 2 weeks I found a beat up betta and guppy one morning. I seperated them both to give them a chance to heal. Both died. Betta 1 - Guppy 1 RIP

[Abercrombie6202]

Well the males develop there gonopodium at about 4 months old so that's when you should be able to tell the gonopodium id like their anal fin!! pretty much all male livebearers will have a long pointy one and females have a normal anal fin!!

I have babies between 2 weeks and 3 months and none have there gonopodiums yet so i'll have to wait too!!! it's a cool suprise.

[sinasster]

mine started to "become" male at about 6 weeks

[beermanic]

I thought that it would be easy to pick out the males because all my current females were basicly black and white. The male had a lot of color to him. So my reasoning would be color=male, black & white=Female. I do however realize that there will some variation but as a general rule.

My goal is to get a strain of females with different color pokadots. We shall see, this is my first time trying the guppies. I had some limited success with angels a few years ago. I had trouble keeping the babies alive for too long. I had some survivors but in general they would die after they started to school. Probably because I didn't have the time back then to spend with them. I had to work long hours and sometimes they would go a long time between feedings. It doesn't hurt the adults but the babies need fed frequently. With the guppies I have a lot of live plants, so there is a lot of pickings to get that I didn't have with a bare angel fish tank.