Did you have some hiding places in your aquarium? That, along with your Mom fairly regularly feeding them, should have been what was needed. (Kudos for your Mom, by the way!)

In Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine, a couple of months ago, was an article by a 13-year old aquarist who ran a series of experiments with pregnant guppies. Basically he kept the female guppies in drum bowls and recorded where the fry swam after being born. Often the female would occupy the middle of the bowl. Almost immediately after unwinding from his release, the fry almost always swam either to the bottom of the bowl or to the surface.

A few did stay in the middle, within the plane of the female's vision. These may have been Scott Lockwood's stupid ones which get eaten. ;)

Newborn fry, who were immediately removed from their mother's company and put in the same sized bowl, spread out all over the bowl. Yet when these same fry were put into a bowl with adult guppies, they headed for the bottom or the top of the water. He concluded that this survival tactic was an innate behavior.

The beauty of that behavior is that in many guppy habitats there would often be some kind of cover both on the "substrate" and in a plant canopy near  where the female would have taken herself to birth her fry. In aquariums, we see females in similar situations trying to keep as invisible a profile as possible. With many predators, the prey is spotted by movement. If they are out of sight, they are out of mind.

Even livebearer species notorious for eating fry in Aquariums (Gambusia, Xenotoca, Brachyraphis) seem to do ok in the wild. It may be that as their females drop, the fry head as far away from them as they can (not being confined by a small glass box) and either hide in the surface plants or bottom mosses and muck. One could suggest that if the slow ones are eaten, that is the species culling and selecting for the fast and the clever, so that the species will survive other predators to grow and reproduce.

On 6-10 I posted a log on mops for livebearers. From the ALA mailing list came a terrific idea for giving fry shelter in tanks with no light and no chance. I have worked with egglayers and mops of synthetic yarn for a long time, but - duh - never thought to use them as cover for livebearer fry. Hopefully old dogs can learn new tricks.

Livebearer guru James Langhammer has long maintained that cannibalism in livebearers is learned. If the parents are well fed, they don't take the opportunity to learn how tasty their fry are. In one of the best guppy books around, Stan Shubel notes that he will try breeding a female guppy one time after she eats some of her fry - a rare case among his fish. If she does it again, her fry are not saved. He feels that the tendancy towards cannibalism is inherited and he will not raise such guppies.

Adult guppies who are starving, will eat two-week old fry. But if we don't miss-treat the adults, they will come to accept the youngsters, especially in a single species tank, as just a part of the adult's world.

So if we give the fry a half a chance to save themselves, they will. Pretty soon you, if you are  like those who wish to save every fry, will be wondering where in the world you can raise all of those guppies. ;) One of the first nick-names given to guppies, by collectors and aquarists almost 100 years ago, was "The Millions Fish". That still applies. :)