Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Anyone know what type of fish this might be?

..

Gambusia

Molly?

They come in so many shapes and sizes it's hard to tell.. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=molli ... 12&bih=935

platty or molly or guppy, depending on the size (its a bit hard to tell from the photos)

all three are the most common livebearers for beginner tropical aquariums

Molly

Was cauggt in freshwater locally is why i ask.

A few years back I took the kids down to our local park to net some live fish to feed to a number of Murray cod I had at the time. They netted about 70 or 80 fish, most of which I could clearly tell were Gambusia. However, there were some fat females with markings, similar to the photo at the start of this thread (rather than just plain grey). The kids decided they wanted to keep those ones in a small aquarium we had. I thought they could be Guppies or Mollies, but wanted to be sure, so I put them all in an esky (along with a couple of plain grey female Gambusia for comparison) and took them down to our local aquarium store for i.d. The guy down there immediately picked out some as Mollies, but couldn’t decide whether the others were Guppies, or Gambusia, they looked just like the plain grey Gambusia in shape... just with markings.

They are all in the same family, but he told me the way to identify Mollies from Guppies is by the Dorsal fin. The dorsal fin on a Molly is usually longer and more prominent, but the most important thing is the starting point of the fin. If you drew a vertical line on the fish where it’s anal fin starts, on a Molly the dorsal fin starts far more forward, well in front of the anal fin. On Guppies the dorsal usually starts around the same position as the anal fin, or slightly behind it. On Gambusia the dorsal fin always starts behind the anal fin. He also said Mollies tend to be thicker in the trunk than guppies and Gambusia, especially just in front of the tail.

P.S. The above is drawn from my memory of a convo that took place about 3 or 4 years ago... so I wouldn't go pasting it into wikipedia, or getting your grundies in a knot if it's wrong... I don't give a sh!t... I'm just passing the info on to the best of my recollection!

On another note, even though Mollies and Gambusia are in the same family, Murray cod always eat the Mollies first… I don’t think they like the taste of Gambusia much… but there's never any Gambusia left in the tank in the morning, so at some point they must become tasty enough...

cheers guys, well I think I can rule out molly, its dorsal is further back then the anal.

Guppy is what it looks like more so then gambusia from my looking on the web, I have a few smaller ones as well that are in a bucket ATM.

its a gambusia but i have never seen markings like that on them,never know it may be a molly crossed with gambusia.With the amount of cross breeding done with livebearers who knows whats possible.
cheers
byron

Surprising what is in our waterways... In the golfcourse over the road from us we've seen some HUGE koi and some silver perch in their lakes. Silvers were the real surprise..

I put those Silvers in those Golf Course Lakes 2 yrs ago, good to see they have survived. I also put some Trout in the deeper lakes if you know where those are!

Get out of it..... What at their request? Right, the deep ones, I'm going to be looking in them next time. The silvers we saw weren't very happy at the time, one looked almost dead, another one wasn't too bad..

I've also seen massive Koi in a lake in a housing estate in Mandurah, but it's the catfish that surprised me, some of them had to be at least a metre long. The kids were telling me "they are this long!"... with their arms outstretched as far as they'd go. I thought they were exaggerating, they are both keen fishers after all, then one surfaced right in front of me... I couldn't believe my eyes at the size of it... and it wasn't alone, we saw a few.

In the middle of a housing estate in the Northern suburbs I've seen guys with deck chairs and decent sized fishing rods settling down for some fishing on the side of a large man made lake just on dark a few times... they must be catching something decent if they keep coming back.

Yeah, they wanted fish in the lakes so the staff could catch em out. The deeper ones with the trout were on the other side of the road from the main complex.