PART 16: IT’S A BOY!

<< Previous As those three platies grew and moved slowly, but steadily, toward their physical maturity, I was getting restless. The seer thought of those platies breeding and bringing the next generation to this world was so exciting for me. Non-commercial Fish-Breeding is always a very interesting subject for any aquarist. There are a few special points in case of fish breeding in your aquarium or fishbowl! The new generation resembles their parents, in many cases. You liked their parents and that’s why you had them in your aquarium or fishbowl. So, you tend to like the next generation, as well. More of good things are always a better deal, anyway.

In many other cases, the babies do not resemble there parents, at all. That is an interesting case too. You get new varieties. Besides these two extreme ends of the cases, there are cases where the babies carry some attributes of their parents and some visible attributes not carried by their parents. And, that too is not less interesting a deal. You, still, get new varieties. There is one more advantage. When you get new fishes from pet-shop or fish-shop, there is always a danger of introducing new diseases and parasites to your fish-tank | aquarium | fishbowl. In case of your fish breeding and bringing another generation to this world, you get new fishes that do not usually carry diseases and parasites new to your fish-tank | aquarium | fishbowl. Is not that a great deal?

Within the next few days, one of the bigger Red Platies started showing the signs of it turning into a male. It was not a case of gender-change or gender-transformation. It was naturally going to be a male and that process just had got started. All the platies are female at their birth. Going ahead, some of those become males and some become females, based on certain complex parameters. The group, kind of, decides which one becomes a male or how many of them become males and how many of them become real females. This decision is made in the interest of expanding their population and avoiding the possibility of going extinct. That’s so beautiful a natural mechanism.

That Red Platy saw its male-organ developing slowly over the next few days. And, it was very much conscious, and probably really happy, about the change that happened. It least, it appeared so on the basis of the way it behaved. Eventually, the group got its first official male member. There were interesting events awaiting us next. NEXT >>  << Previous

PART 16: IT’S A BOY! by Debi Prasad Mahapatra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.