Tale of a Tail or maybe TMI

So last year for her birthday, our 7 year old dearly wanted a pet.

Dearly.

So we all discussed it and decided we would get our feet wet with some guppies. We set up the 10 gallon aquarium that my parents gave us and we were on our way to pet ownership.

I will be completely honest here and say that we set up the tank, just like all the instructions say and we even let it run a week before we bought fish. We went to Pets Mart, bought 6 guppies, and Birthday girl named them all. And they died two days later.

And it was just a wee bit traumatic.

The second batch of guppies did much better for some reason and within a month or two we had a pregnant guppy.

Birthday girl was over the moon in excitement because she was going to be a guppy mommy.

We did everything to the letter to ensure the smoothest delivery possible. We bought a breeder basket that has a mesh net in it and put it in the tank and put the mama in it. Birthday girl kept a 24 hour watch to make sure we knew the minute the babies were being born.

So the babies were born but we only ended up with 3 baby guppies from the first batch. We think she probably ate the others before we could net them out.

The real trouble came when the next guppy was pregnant. We could tell (because we had done this once so we were now experts) that her abdomen was squared off and that she should have the babies at any minute. But we had to go pick up older brother from b-ball practice and were gone a total of 45 minutes.

When we got back, the pregnant mama was dead. That's right, she was floating with her tail up and Birthday girl was crushed. The thing about guppies is that they are live bearers. Which means they don't lay eggs. They babies come out swimming. And Birthday girl just knew all those little baby guppies were inside their dead mama and that we needed to rescue them.

So I did what any compassionate mother who had taken every type of animal dissection college class available would have done. I decided we needed to try to save the babies.

Can I just say, that trying to save baby guppies is on a completely different scale than dissecting sharks, pigs, frogs, etc? We decided to get a sharp knife and try to cut her open from the abdomen. It was very difficult but we finally did it.

And we were so disappointed because we fully expected all these little babies to come out and that they would be saved and they would go on to live a full and happy guppy life in her little tank.

But alas, they were all dead.

I did some reading later and actually found a forum of people discussing the ethics of trying to save the baby guppies once the mother died.

Yes, there are some fanatic people out there who believe that if you try to save the babies, you are desecrating the mom.

And then there was one lady who said, 'who cares about the mom, she's dead, save those babies!' and she went on to explain that all you need to do is cut the tail off, make a small slit from the abdomen to the tail and then gently squeeze the babies out. But she says you need to do this the second the mom dies or the babies will die too.

Fortunately for me, since this time, all the mommy guppies we have had have either had their babies or have died while we were out. So I have not been called to attempt this feat again.

But I'm sure you are asking yourself, would she really do it again?

You bet'cha.