Tropical Fish Forum
Tropical Fish Keeping Help and Advice => General Fishkeeping advice => Topic started by: JimmyL on April 03, 2014, 01:59:36 PM
-
So, not quite an emergency, but a worrisome situation. I rescued 8 short-finned dalmatian/marble mollies a month ago from a friend who's tank shattered (cup of tea too close to an old tank). He has given most of the fish away from the spare buckets he was keeping them in, and I took aboard his mollies. They are a dalmatian p. latipinna and marbled p. sphenops cross with gorgeous silver, black & white colouring, so are fine in my medium water with no salt. In fact, they are thriving. They are often seen playing, and sucking algae from the top of the tank (and expelling the bubbles, which is rather humorous) during the daytime. Occasionally I have even seen them cleaning my corys, who sit there with their fins flared, obviously enjoying the attention.
Now that you have a background, onto the issue. I did some research into them, and looked into sexing. 7 of the 8 are female...and PREGNANT. Not a major concern in and of itself, but if they all drop 50 babies each, then I might be in trouble. The local shop won't take them until they are at least 8 weeks old, preferably 10. Of course, being the stunning colour they are, if they breed well, and I can handle 350 little extra fish swimming around, I could sell them for quite a little profit - about $3-4 each.
What would be the best course of action from here on in?
-
You probably won't have as many fry in your tank as you are concerned about as the adults (and any other fish in the tank) will eat them. That should reduce the fry population to something more manageable. Of course in heavily planted tanks the fry will have more places to hide until they are too big to eat.
Since you have only one male molly, one option is to rehome the male. Once the females have used up their stored sperm, there won't be any more fry. Unless you leave the male fry in the same tank once they reach adolescence. However, trying to spot every single male fry as soon as the gonopodium begins to develop will be a mammoth task in itself.
Other than that, lots of grow-out tanks :-\
And don't forget that female fry can be impregnated very young. They are in danger from your adult male from a couple of weeks old. They won't be able to have fry till they mature but they could well already be storing sperm by then.
-
Hmm, yea. I know that they can be impregnated from 4 weeks. I might chuck the fry into my Tetra tank, and if the Congo tetras nab a couple, so be it - extra protein. That should stop inbreeding too. I might be able to talk my LFS owner into taking them, he is a reasonable dude and hopefully will be able to help me out a bit. I know he loves mollies, especially unusual ones, and is short at the moment.
-
Just a quick update, the mollies dropped between 2 and 4 babies each, I guess the adults are not fully grown yet. I was also surprised at how big the babies are, they are huge for babies, I feel sorry for my poor mollies for having to pop big ones like that out. It's a hell of a relief, and the babies can just stay there until they get big enough to trade at my LFS.
-
Compared to eggs layers, livebearers do have huge fry. They are so big they can be fed crushed up adult food rather than specialist fry food like egg layers.