Lennie

Thanks for sharing! Very cute indeed, no matter how plain the color is. @Schuyler Their lifespan is quite short right? So you should expect them to breed or else it is kind of a dead investment? >_> They are quite pricey here. How easy it is to breed them?

I only let it stay in the tank I grow fry. Fry benefit from it. Otherwise, I don't like it and clean it myself. Especially because I like bottom dwellers. I don't like the idea of my bottom dwellers constantly being inside decayed stuff sitting on the bottom of the tank. Also with every move, they make it move around the water column again.

Update: I visited my LFS today. They had cute mollies, but there was one dead in their tank and two were not looking very well. Others were all looking healthy and active but I couldn't be sure. I asked, and they told me they keep them in pure freshwater. Maybe they were bred in saltwater and moved directly to freshwater so it affected them negatively. Also, they already had lots of babies in the store. Kinda scary. There were around 40 babies with no cover. Adults did not seem to care at all.

Just as I expected... They all had really good red coloring.

Hey, Could you please share your female(s) when you have time? My lfs recently started carrying them as well but to me, they all look like males. They claim to have females but they are all super colorful just like the ones in your picture. Very cool fish!

Okay I want this.

Let's be fair, you don't need a 75g for a lot of fish. For mollies, you again don't need one. The sad thing is, bigger tank means more substrate, plants, bigger light, filter etc. So usually it comes with more expensive combination with itself. I'd rather have a smaller tank with higher quality products if I really don't want a fish specific for 75g and up. I currently have 4 tanks excluding the pest snail jar I made. 45 Liters tub, 40 Liters shallow betta tank, 160 Liters and 125 Liters community tanks. All different sizes with different type of fish. I enjoy this variety. Sometimes all you need is a tank they you have a fish inside that you enjoy. I look forward to wake up and see my betta next to me and feed him one by one everyday. I love dropping a snello and watching mystery snails going crazy over it and turning into a napping poop machine in 10 minutes 😄 I would say go smaller, but make it better with more plants, maybe better substrate, light, filter, as long as you have something you will enjoy in your mind 🙂

I personally love New Life Spectrum products. Have been feeding Thera A+ for so long in my tanks, super happy about it. Recently got small fish formula due to the smaller size. I also got Dainichi Tropical micro recently. Too early to say, but so far so good. They mainly make food for cichlids! The one I use is more like a community tank formula. All 4 tanks loved both NLS and Dainichi. Including betta. But these brands are not available in coop site. As they are not available in my country, never tried them before, but from coop I would order xtreme and respashy.

Can you please share your water parameters? How long your tank has been setup, is it cycled? What is your water temp, ammonia/Nitrite/nitrate, gh, kh, ph? What type of an aquarium salt treatment you applied, for how long, what was your ratio? These questions may help to get a better answer. @Colu @Odd Duck

Prime. Never faced any issues water conditioning related so why bother to change when something is already working well

I can imagine. My male was constantly picking on big mts as well. Not letting it come out of its shell

Hello. Thanks for sharing the thread. I tried siesta method for my 29g last year, and had no positive results, or better to say, no difference in my experience. So Instead, in the new tanks I start with 6 hours of lighting. And gradually, when I observe good growth, I increase it to 7 and keep it there forever. The appearance of algae was really small, barely noticable, only on top of two rotala branches. I believe rosy barbs do a good job but I feed the tank well as it is a community, so it makes sense to keep multiple hair algae eaters just as a preventative method I believe My light has no direct blues. Only pink, red and whites, full spectrum. I avoid using blue myself.

Sounds like guppies 😄 I can't keep guppies there as there are rosy barbs already. They are super peaceful but I can't risk them nipping guppy tails. Also not sure if they would eat hair algae just as good as mollies anyway. But I def see livebearer situation being overwhelming with so many babies. I have good relations with my LFS, so I may contact them if I have issues I bet. Can be nice to have mollies bred in local waters and without much salt content I bet.

Some babies can be fun, dunno how many would survive in a community tank but still. I was normally terrified of fry as they give me anxiety. I currently have fry of some fish and I don’t know which fish at all! Probably someone laid in any of my tanks some eggs to floating plant roots, and they hatched in the snail quarantine I made while medicating my all tanks! Growing them up in a seperate tank made me realised I actually missed how cute the fry are

Well, I personally really enjoy puppy behavior on fish. The ones that have such behavior in my tanks are my black rams and especially betta. So I enjoy having interaction with them the most. For schooling fish, my point goes to rosy barbs from the same perspective. Active and puppy like. Visually most pleasing to watch? Angelfish. the cutest? Pygmy cories. If inverts count, Rick, my mystery snail was the thing I love the most in my tanks. May he rest in piece. I miss him a lot.

That’s nice to hear! I should consider give them a chance. They are cute anyway 🙂

Hey again, it is hard for me to say as I have never kept them before myself (sadly 😞 ) so @dasaltemelosguy may help better regarding the dojo loaches!

@beastie check these out! 🙂

My suggestion would be, if you wanna keep corys, lean towards small ones like pygmys or pandas. I used to keep my sterbais in 29g and when they reached adulthood it became really annoying with breeding actions. They were stressing other fish constantly due to glass surfing and being super active. When I moved them to 3ft tank it is at least better.

Yea... Same goes for one of my rummy noses. She eats like crazy compared to any other fish I have. So she is insanely fat..... I have been fasting the tanks lately and underfeeding, she is looking better rn.

Good question. My water goes through water softener, so gh reads 0. Is iron efficiently removed through water softener system as well? Never thought of it. A lil bit of googling: "Water softeners can and do remove small amounts of iron. Yet, a standard softener is not specifically designed to treat high levels of iron in your water. For example, the water softener systems Water-Right manufacturers remove iron in concentrations up to 1 ppm, or 1 mg/L." "Water softeners are designed to soften your water, not remove iron. So even though a small amount of iron can be removed by a water softener, you should not count on that as your sole source of iron removal. " So seems like it removes some, but not all, if there is any. Hard to know without a test kit I bet.

Hey there, The tank gets 7 hours of light with a hightech LED. I fertilize the tank half amount recommended by Tropica Premium Nutrition. Again half dose of seachem potassium, and equilibrium during water changes. I always dose low in my tanks as I always use aquasoil on bottom and mainly keep root feeders. No plants ever show deficiencies, so I try to avoid dosing nitrate to water column. Just potassium and trace elements really. The tank is heavily planted, lots of floating plants, staying around 5-10 nitrate in general. My tap has 20 nitrate, so water change actually adds some nitrate to my tanks, which are usually consumed by plants easily, so I don't mind. I do water changes once a week, with gravel vac the sand parts and not touching aquasoil parts, around %30-40 water change. So I believe I just need some assistance of more algae eaters, because hair algae is the only problem I ever face really, I had a very bad one in my old 29g, causing almost death to 4 fish/inverts of mine back then and I was very pissed of. Thankfully none in any other 4 tanks, but today, after months, I've seen slight growth on the top of rotala. So yea, any potential hair algae eating fish in addition to rosy barbs can be nice! If you have any recommendations regarding the abovementioned schedule of mine, please feel free to share you opinion. I can't really afford CO2 sadly, very expensive to setup and sustain in my country. And I feel like DIY ones look both unpleasing and seems very inconsistent. I'd rather have a stability or nothing.

My sparklings interact with each other all the time. So I would say 3 at least personally. They like to socialize and croaking each other is worth to see

Good reminder. Forgot to mention we dont have flagfish as well. Adding it!

Hey, So as the title says, are mollies actually good at eating algae? Especially hair algae? I’m starting to see slight growth of hair algae in one of my tanks. AND I HATE IT FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART :)))) So any slight growth should be destroyed from the beginning before it can slightly grow!! 😄 I have some rosy barbs in that tank and they do pick at algae from time to time. But I would love to increase the potential hairy type algae eaters in that tank. The tank meets molly parameters, 24C, 7gh, 13 kh, 7.5 ph. 33g/125 liters. I have 3 SAEs in my big tank and cannot get any juveniles and remove one again in the future to move them again, it would crowd too much. They have their own established dominance right now so I don’t wanna remove them from the big tank to be introduced back again later on. They grow pretty fast anyway, I’d rather have something works in long term. Also any other potential hair algae type eaters suggestions are welcomed. just a note: we don’t have amanos in my country since pandemic, and shrimps cannot make it in that tank no matter how densely planted it is. So shrimp are out of the plan. Edit: we also don’t have flagfish. I forgot to mention that one. Thanks everyone for the help,