Hello all.
Background:
One of my tanks is a 220 litre in which I keep my liberty mollies (P. salvatoris). A few weeks ago, I partitioned the tank into two halves (to separate the males from the females), as I was being overrun (again) with fry.
My technique for fry handling in this tank is this:
I've got two breeding boxes attached to the tank glass.. a small plastic one which I use to hold newborn fry for a couple of days (this stops any newborn fry which hay have remnants of their eggsac in place being killed by larger fry), after this time, I move them to the larger breeding box for a couple of weeks.
After this time, they are moved to an 80 litre growout tank.
Anyway, as any molly keeper will tell you, it is not unknown for the females to keel over and die after giving birth.. This is what happened today.
I noticed that a 6 month old female was in labour at about 08:00 this morning. She released 7 fry (I managed to catch 6 of them), and she then started appearing very listless..
I recognise this behaviour as a prelude to her demise. I left the tank for about half an hour and when I returned, I was very surprised to see this female had jumped into the small breeding box. It appeared that she wanted to be with her offspring as she died. I've never had a liberty molly jump into either breeding box, let alone one that is dying!
She lived another 20 minutes before expiring.
This just struck me as quite sad...
Bodge99.
Background:
One of my tanks is a 220 litre in which I keep my liberty mollies (P. salvatoris). A few weeks ago, I partitioned the tank into two halves (to separate the males from the females), as I was being overrun (again) with fry.
My technique for fry handling in this tank is this:
I've got two breeding boxes attached to the tank glass.. a small plastic one which I use to hold newborn fry for a couple of days (this stops any newborn fry which hay have remnants of their eggsac in place being killed by larger fry), after this time, I move them to the larger breeding box for a couple of weeks.
After this time, they are moved to an 80 litre growout tank.
Anyway, as any molly keeper will tell you, it is not unknown for the females to keel over and die after giving birth.. This is what happened today.
I noticed that a 6 month old female was in labour at about 08:00 this morning. She released 7 fry (I managed to catch 6 of them), and she then started appearing very listless..
I recognise this behaviour as a prelude to her demise. I left the tank for about half an hour and when I returned, I was very surprised to see this female had jumped into the small breeding box. It appeared that she wanted to be with her offspring as she died. I've never had a liberty molly jump into either breeding box, let alone one that is dying!
She lived another 20 minutes before expiring.
This just struck me as quite sad...
Bodge99.
sorry for your loss... but at least she died peacefully with her babies! 
