Gold + Black Mollies

[FishNiX]

hey guys--
i have one black molly (female) in my community tank and i have recently purchased 2 gold mollies (male + female) to help me finish maturing my african cuchlid tank. now, before you all get mad, realise that i ran the filter media in my community tank's filter for 1 week and also used 10 gallons of water from that tank when setting the 20 Gallon Cichlid tank up. so now, i am jsut using the mollies to help me finish maturing before i spend tons of money on cichlids i'm thinking of moving the black molly into the tank as well to keep the male gold molly from strssing the female...

here are my questions:

1. will the gold mollies breed with the black molly?
2. is a ph of around 7.9/8.0 and high hardness going to hurt the mollies if they are only in there for a month or so?
3. how slowly will i need to go if i move the black into the tank with higher ph? my community tank is CO2 injected, and has driftwood, so the ph is around 7.4, also the temperature in the cichlid tank is only around 75, but im increasing it slowly to 78 or 79.

any advice would be greatly appreciated!! thanks all!

 

[FishNiX]

ugh...i ve been trying to catch my black molly all day!!! my tank is heavily planted and it is very hard to get her out in he open!!

 

[MollieDad]

I'm not an expert, but I've had Mollies for awhile...

1. All mollies can breed with each other- so yes..
2. A ph of 7.8 is high end for mollies, but you should be able to get away with it..
3. Move it as you normally would ( in a bag to let the temp adjust), but what I would do is take a little of the tank water you're moving it into and pour that into bag with its tank water. You don't have to use alot of water from the tank you're moving him into (about 10% of the bags water), but I would leave him in the bag for about 45 minutes and add more tank water to the bag every 15 minutes, then it should be good to go..

Hope that helps..

 

[FishNiX]

ok...im in the process

do you think there will be a problem with the fact that my black female molly is full grown and quite large for a molly... and that the golds are much smaller? i think that the golds are sexually mature, but still only about half the size...

thanks!

 

[MollieDad]

I've got a small adolescent male thats maybe 4 months old (from a first batch of fry) and I'm not sure if he is sexually mature or not, but he sure does try..

Good luck!!

 

[FishNiX]

well, im not sure what happened, but the gold female didnt make it

ive now got a very large black female with the smaller gold male...should i get another gold female?

 

[HeatherSweetness]

You can get another female,but the pair should be fine. Oh,gold mollies and black mollies make the prettiest babies.

I have a female from my gold and black pair that had a bright orange head,a black body,and a gold belly. She was so cute I kept her.

 

[guppymonkey]

I don't know why you would mature a tank with mollies. Mollies are not very good cycling fish. I would have gone with guppies instead. All mollies can interbreed but I wouldn't worry too much about that if they are in an African setup. The water parameters are not anywhere near what mollies like so I would worry more about them dying in the tank.