I did it!!! No More Pickled Mollies.

[stresco]

For those of you who don’t know, I have been attempting to acclimate fresh water mollies into salt water. I have a 10 gal QT that was just sitting here, and a couple of fish that like live food on occasion. So adding 2 and 2 together I came up with 5 and I thought why not breed some sort of feeder fish. Chatting on AA, someone mentioned to me that mollies can be introduced to higher levels of SG and PH than other FW fish so I should try and breed them in SW because they breed like bunnies.

I have been trying for some time now and have not been able to get any mollies to live in SW longer than a week . I decided that this group of 3 mollies that I bought from PetCo 2 weeks ago would be my last attempt. I bought 1 male and 2 fat females, hoping that they were pregnant. I drip acclimated them to over 12 hours and introduced them to the tank. The male lived 3 days, and I have been waiting for the females to die as well. To my surprise, this morning I noticed 15+ baby mollies hiding in a plastic plant, that I just happened to find while I was cleaning out some old fish stuff last night. I just stuck it in the QT without even anchoring it. Now all they have to do is live long enough to grow to a size that I can feed my other fish.

 

[RogerMcAllen]

Wow, I would have thought that the babies would be way more sensative to salinity and would have died right away. How salty is the molly tank compared to a regular sw tank?

 

[stresco]

Same as my main tank 1.023

 

[BillyZ]

I think I would have taken a different approach and rather that try and acclimate the fish straight to 1.023 sg, I would have started them off MUCH lower and slowly increased the sg in the QT. I think you would have had much better success and certainly wouldn't have killed as many fish.

 

[stresco]

I did start it off at a lower SG. In the begining, it was barely 1.009, i just got fed up and started increasing the SG.

 

[possum]

Some mollie "experts" claim that mollies dont get as big if you keep them in freshwater and that the fry grow alot faster in full strength seawater. Just my 2 pennies.

 

[Ish]

I acclimatised 4 silver mollies over 1 week.

started in 1 quarter salt water to 3/4 freshwater.
day 2 add a little bit more salt water by cleaning the tank

day 3. half salt. half fresh.

day 4. add a bit more salt water by cleaning the tank

day 5. 3/4 salt. 1/4 fresh.

weekend. put them in the salt tank !

now i have 4 happy silver mollies in full salt water that actually school really nicely
(which they didnt do in fresh water)..

(also... they finished off cycling the tank for me).

I've heard that in salt water there far more placid than they are in fresh and are good to keep with some more docile marine fish that would otherwise get picked on. They are big eaters though !