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Mollies


Carlkoko05
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I have a 55 gallon tank with 6 mollies. 1 male 5 females. 2 females have gotten pregnant in the last couple of months. First female died while giving birth. Other female had 2 fry and then she also died. Is this a common occurrence or I’m having bad luck or doing something wrong. 2 fry are about 2 weeks old and doing great in a breeder box in the tank.

 

thank you for any advice

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Sorry to hear about the loss of some of your females! I haven't tried mollies yet, but I do have growing colonies of endlers, platies, guppies, and swordtails. In my experience, yeah, females do tend to be much shorter-lived than males. Giving birth to large, healthy, developed young is really hard on their bodies, not to mention getting constantly chased by the males.

That said, it does seem unusual to have two die so close together, both from hard births. Does the male have a huge head or something? That's more of a joke than a sincere question, but maybe he does have some genetic thing where his offspring are very hard to give birth to. Are they balloon mollies?

One thing I know about mollies is that they need Very Hard water to thrive. Many are even kept in brackish tanks before being sold to pet stores. I don't know if there's a strong connection between GH and ease of childbirth, but making sure you have their preferred hardness levels could probably help in many ways.

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@Kirsten brings up some good points. I had a dwarf platy (similar body shape to a balloon molly) that died when giving birth and I wondered if it was from her body shape. On the other hand, I also have very soft water (low GH), so it could have been complications from that. Ever since I started adding extra minerals using Seachem Equilibrium, none of the other dwarf platies have had issues giving birth. I'm still not sure to this day what the cause was. 🤷‍♀️

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  • 2 months later...

Thank you all, i will keep these recommendations in mind. I recently was told my water was to soft so I’m in the process of making it harder. Hopefully that does the trick. City where I’m at has very hard tap water so I was scared to use and was using filtered water. But in my last 2 water changes I’ve been treating my tap water and monitoring closely. Will see how things go in the future.

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I do guppies which all I got from different stores were preg when I got them but they didn’t look it as soon as I fed them up it was noticeable. They all struggle to some degree with birthing and recovery. I lost one during and one 2 weeks after.  Being underfed and flown on planes is hard on top of pregnancies.  Their batches are always lower in number and fry are always smaller birthing takes longer. The girls born in my tank geese..champs..they get huge and pop them out in a few hours and then act as if nothing happened. Their fry are larger and number minimum double what store bought drop. I know I super amp the calcium in the tank with the two remaining females …I have no other store bought anymore all my tank bred. It seems to help a smidge or it just makes me feel like I’m doing good for them so I imagine it…take your pick I’m old and eccentric.  These are just my observations from my own tanks. Hope it helps a bit. I’m sorry for your loss I know it’s hard. 

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