Questions about my mollies

[suarfin]

Hi everyone, this is my first post! Sorry if it's a bit long, lol. My boyfriend and I bought a 5 gallon tank about 2 months ago with 2 male mollies(1 black and 1 orange spotted), a pleco, a Cory catfish and a small fiddler crab. A few days ago, we bought a 10-gallon tank and 2 African dwarf frogs to add to our family and moved everyone over to the new tank. Last night, we went out to the creek behind our school's campus and picked up a couple rocks we thought would look nice in the tank. We added them after boiling them for about 10 minutes and letting them cool off. Just tonight, we noticed our black molly acting strangely, leaning to one side every once in a while and righting himself after a few seconds. We thought that it may have been because of metals in the new rocks we added, so we took them out right away, and he kept leaning every now and then. Is there something else that could be causing it? We aren't very experienced, since we just got into the hobby a few months ago, so we aren't sure if we're doing something wrong. We do our best to keep the water clean and changed it every 2-3 weeks when we had them all in the 5-gallon.

We also noticed that our orange molly has been "wiggling" or "shimmying" pretty often. We thought it was cute at first, but we looked it up and aren't sure if it's due to stress(the black molly is very dominant and chases him around the tank sometimes) or if it's an issue with the water quality.

Please let us know if you guys have any advice! We would really appreciate it!!! We love our fish so much and just want to give them the best home possible! Thanks again.

TL,DR: One molly is leaning every once in a while and one is shimmying. Please help!

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

Hi and welcome to the hobby!

Do you have a water testing kit? What are the water test results?


I'm afraid your stock is also quickly going to outgrow the ten gallon tank too, mollies can get pretty sizeable, and really need a larger tank. Cories are also a schooling fish that need friends of the same species, a group of six or more is best, so a larger tank than a ten gallon to accommodate this too. It's also best to keep frogs and fish in separate tanks... the ten gallon would make a nice home for the frogs if you upgrade the fish to a larger tank later, but lets worry about that once we've made sure they're okay.

Not judging you over this, I promise! A lot of people have stocking problems when they first start the hobby, and fish stores often give some bad advice too. It's a steep learning curve when you first begin fish keeping. Just want to help you with that curve so you can provide the best for your fish

 

[suarfin]

Hi and welcome to the hobby!

Do you have a water testing kit? What are the water test results?


I'm afraid your stock is also quickly going to outgrow the ten gallon tank too, mollies can get pretty sizeable, and really need a larger tank. Cories are also a schooling fish that need friends of the same species, a group of six or more is best, so a larger tank than a ten gallon to accommodate this too. It's also best to keep frogs and fish in separate tanks... the ten gallon would make a nice home for the frogs if you upgrade the fish to a larger tank later, but lets worry about that once we've made sure they're okay.

Not judging you over this, I promise! A lot of people have stocking problems when they first start the hobby, and fish stores often give some bad advice too. It's a steep learning curve when you first begin fish keeping. Just want to help you with that curve so you can provide the best for your fish

Thanks for responding! We'll go and get a water testing kit after our classes today. Unfortunately our college only allows tanks of 10 gallons or less, so I don't know if that can be resolved anytime soon. I'll update you as soon as I get the water test results back.