Newbie Seeks Help.....

[HARRIRABBIT]

Hello everyone, I am looking to buy my first tank early next year and have been doing some research. I have a couple of questions which I hope someone can help me out with. My tank is going to be 125L capacity measuring 80 x 35 x 45cm. I would like to just keep Mollies. Can you please advise how many fish would be suitable for a tank this size. Also, I am confused as to how long the light should be left on for. Any help gratefully received. Many thanks.

 

[anwhyte]

Hello everyone, I am looking to buy my first tank early next year and have been doing some research. I have a couple of questions which I hope someone can help me out with. My tank is going to be 125L capacity measuring 80 x 35 x 45cm. I would like to just keep Mollies. Can you please advise how many fish would be suitable for a tank this size. Also, I am confused as to how long the light should be left on for. Any help gratefully received. Many thanks.

Hi, you could keep 20 mollys in a tank that size. As to lighting, if you have live plants in the tank then you should turn the lights on for maybe 5/6 hours in the evening (assuming you're at work during the day), the fish don't care about the lights, they are just for us to watch them & for the plants to photosynthesise.

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the site HarriRabbit.
I would try to limit a molly stocking in a tank that size to about 15 common aquarium mollies. If you start getting into the large sailfin mollies instead, you will only be able to properly house 5 or 6 of them.

 

[waterdrop]

I agree about the lights. They will depend on the plants. Some people start the lighting off as low as 4 hours for a week or two but then increase to 5,6,7 ending somewhere in that range depending on how the plants do. Too much light can help encourage algae, so that's one of the tradeoffs.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[HARRIRABBIT]

Thank you all for the advice. Just one more question - I will be keeping the smaller Mollies but should I start off with a few and add more as I go along rather than going out and buying 10 or so in one go? Thanks for explaining about the light. I am really looking forward to starting this new hobby, I am off skiing in March but hopefully will get the tank ready and cycled before I go. Thanks everyone....

 

[waterdrop]

Re your stocking question - from the cycling side of the question, a good fishless cycle done via our Add&Wait method per the writeup by RDD in the resource center and done interactively here in your thread with the members helping you should result in the ability to fully stock the tank immediately after the fishless cycle "qualifies" itself. And a species-specific is indeed one of rare cases where people really do this.

However, from the "molly acquisition" side of things I will defer to OM47 and Laura and other molly experienced folks we have on TFF -- I don't know if there might be some other reason from the molly standpoint that one might not want an immediate full stocking or it might just be that finding a full-stocking (15 regular mollies or so) of specimiens that you are happy with might be difficult, in which case, yes, you'd be back to small (2 or 3 molly?) additions with a couple weeks between each addition to to allow the bacteria to enlarge their colonies. (ie. the first stocking could be as large as the number of good ones found but the subsequent additions would be small and a couple weeks apart.)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[HARRIRABBIT]

Re your stocking question - from the cycling side of the question, a good fishless cycle done via our Add&Wait method per the writeup by RDD in the resource center and done interactively here in your thread with the members helping you should result in the ability to fully stock the tank immediately after the fishless cycle "qualifies" itself. And a species-specific is indeed one of rare cases where people really do this.

However, from the "molly acquisition" side of things I will defer to OM47 and Laura and other molly experienced folks we have on TFF -- I don't know if there might be some other reason from the molly standpoint that one might not want an immediate full stocking or it might just be that finding a full-stocking (15 regular mollies or so) of specimiens that you are happy with might be difficult, in which case, yes, you'd be back to small (2 or 3 molly?) additions with a couple weeks between each addition to to allow the bacteria to enlarge their colonies. (ie. the first stocking could be as large as the number of good ones found but the subsequent additions would be small and a couple weeks apart.)

~~waterdrop~~

Waterdrop, many thanks for your help on this, much appreciated!