Prego Molly, Not So Prego Anymore

[K3lly]

OK, so the other morning I wake up, look into my fish tank, and notice my prego female is not 'fat' anymore.
So I'm looking around for anybabies............................. THEY ATE ALL OF 'EM
And there was prolly 30 of em, its hard for me to believe not one was able to hide from the adults!!
Or maybe she wasnt pregnant..? Is there anything else that would cause her to blow up like that?

 

[kizno1]

some of them might be hiding 1 of my guppies gave birth and i didnt see any fry for about 3 days i looked in there today and theres about 10

some of them might be hiding 1 of my guppies gave birth and i didnt see any fry for about 3 days i looked in there today and theres about 10

 

[OldMan47]

K3lly, if you do not have good dense cover, it is common to lose all fry. In a typical well populated aquarium a dense cover would be something like an impenetrable mass of java moss like this. This clump half fills a 10 gallon tank. There is an adult Heterandria formosa visible in the top left corner of the picture.

With adequate cover, or the right female, you can very high numbers of survivors like this instead.

 

[Jdubz]

do you have gravel or sand, the babies tend to drop down into the gravel if its quite course and stay there for a while and only come out at night.

And they are bloody quick i just had to catch and move 4 3week old fry.

 

[MewMew42]

aww im sorry to hear they may have been eaten =[
when my guppy gave birth all the fry hid at the top by the heater where i had out a couple maybe 2 or 3 plant trimmings, i think it made all the difference even though i only found 12 it was good enough!

but also check around and inside your ornaments as a couple tend to hide in there

and its true they are bloody fast!

 

[HCpetraitis]

Check EVERYWHERE! Once I found a 5 babies in my filter, 2 in the plant roots, and like a couple in my gravel. You could move some of your plants and stuff around and usually a few will pop up possibly.

 

[K3lly]

It feels like I looked EVERYWHERE, about 200 times.
All in the plants I got in there, in the filter, up around the heater, in the 'grass sprouts' I have in there, down in the gravel.
I was thinking it would be pretty easy to see them even if they were hid really good, the female is white, so I'm assuming she got pregnant by one of the white males in the tank she was in at the store. (all the mollies in her tank were white) The gravel is dark, blues, purples, and greens.
I meant to get some more fake plants for them to hide in the day before I noticed she wasn't fat any more....but i forgot.
Even though I wasn't really wanting a whole bunch more fish, because I only have a 10 gal, I would have liked for one of them to make it!

The guy at PetSmart that got them out for me was telling me that if my yellow/orange male got one of my black females pregnant, they would have what he called 'Chocolate' fish..... and he said they are rare.... not sure how true that all is. But I have never seen a 'chocolate' molly!!

 

[HCpetraitis]

I'm sorry to say this but she might have aborted them. Otherwise they were probably all eaten.

 

[K3lly]

I'm sorry to say this but she might have aborted them. Otherwise they were probably all eaten.

What does that mean, how can they do that?
I had no idea they were able to do that!
If she did that, where did they go?
Could it be because the male in the tank is not the father?

I really had no interest in breeding them, but like I said before... I wouldn't mind if one of them survived.
I just don't want my tank to be over populated, and since I would/could never just 'flush 'em' I would rely on
survival of the fittest, and try to 'rehome' them if there ended up too many of them, or get another tank, which
I'm not opposed to doing. And does anyone know if the 'chocolate' molly happens a lot? I think I would be happy
to end up with one or two of them. Just because I have never seen, or even heard of one before.

 

[OldMan47]

Fish like mollies do not pair up as such. There is no father in terms of care for the young. Even the female will not provide any care for a molly fry. Fry can be aborted, miscarried, if the female is stressed too much. Moving from a fish shop to your home can easily provide the stress for that to happen. If you have lost all of the fry, it is not a catastrophe. There will be more fry in about 5 to 6 weeks in a typical molly, my female delivers drops at exactly 6 weeks. I have never heard of that chocolate molly either but who knows, the guy might actually know something, as rare as that is in most fish shops.

 

[HCpetraitis]

Welll, aborting the babies means she never has the babies. Or she could be so stressed out that she gives birth to eggs. The eggs will not hatch or grow into fry. They are usually yellow or white. When she aborts them, they will most likely be eaten by other fish. Also, the father doesn't matter to the females. They don't have husbands or wives. It's just they breed and don't care who it is. They don't even like their kids! I have four chocolate babies. I think... They are orange in the front but black in the back. They came from my black molly so they had to be part black and then something else.

 

[K3lly]

Here is a picture of my molly..... before she deflated!!

 

[HCpetraitis]

She looks really healthy!

 

[electric yellow]

I'm sorry to say this but she might have aborted them. Otherwise they were probably all eaten.

I had a molly do that to me aswell. I was dead sure she was pregnant and then one day...nothing...then she got fat again. i added loads and loads of plants so you had to swim through the plants to see anything and there was lots of babies.

I remember aswell the mum died giving birth so i thought none had survived...untill i emptied the tank, scraped the sand out and low and behold there was a lil fry sitting under the filter!!!! I called him Hercules. He died a few weeks later though but he was gorgeous to feed and look after.

 

[jackyb07s4]

just to be sure..she isn't a balloon molly...right? If she isn't a balloon molly and she was as big as that, I'm very surprised all of the fry were eaten.

Yes chocolate mollies do exist!