Surprise Mystery Babies

[KatieT]

Hello

Firstly, this site is great, and many of my questions have been answered by these forums but... I need some advice. Ive had a healthy tank of mollies for 2 years now and after some recent losses to my little fish family I decided to replensih my tank with more mollies and some guppies as well. Its been 4 days since I added 2 mollies and 8 guppies and I woke up yesterday morning to find 3 little baby fry! Firstly I have no idea which fish gave birth or even which breed! Is there anyway I can tell? I don't know how safe they are, they've been ok so far but they are hiding in plants in a little corner of the tank and are not getting the food. Where can I get a breeding trap from? will any good pet shop sell them and what do they look like?

I hadn't planned on breeding so this is all a shock, the people in the pet shop assured me all my fish were male! But obviously I want to take care of the little ones as best I can so any advice is welcome.

Thanks for the info so far.. its been a great help

 

[Annastasia]

First off, congratulations!

If you have Mollies and Guppies, it should be pretty easy to tell. The Molly fry are bigger then the Guppy fry, but since you may not know the size of them both...I guess that doesn't help! What colors are your fish? You might be able to go by that.

Most any LFS will have a breeder trap. I'd recommend a breeder net though, to give them more room. Breeder nets look like this. Be aware you cannot keep the fry in there for more then a few weeks, otherwise you risk stunting. I also suggest you check out the pinned topic on breeder traps/nets.

Also, have you read the pinned topics and FAQs on fry care? Do you have an specific questions that they didn't answer?

And out of curiousity, are you keeping the Mollies in salt, or hard and alkaline water? Usually people have issues keeping them in plain fresh. We have yet another pinned topic on that. We're big on pinned topics here.

Good luck!