Baby mollies dying

[katana]

I used to be Finian on here but lost that email so now I'm Katana.
Anyway I have a tank of mollies and everyone knows that mollies breed like rabbits. I have no males in the tank at the moment that are old enough to breed.
One of my older mollies had her three batches of babies who are all doing great. Just waiting to be able to see their gender before selling them.
But a fourth batch of babies showed up. Not sure which Molly had those, possibly one of the younger mollies I purchased recently.
Anyway, that batch of babies seem to do fine but I found two dead ones in the filter. I removed them and tested the water. The water was fine but I did a 50% water change anyway just to be safe. As I was doing it I noticed one of the new babies floating around like he had died, but was still trying to swim. I scooped him out an put him in a bucket where he died a few minutes later. Since then three more babies have died. All the youngest batch.

Do you think it is a defect they have? There were probably 20 of them and I suspect the mother was the young Molly. Any help would be appreciated!


The tank is 45 gallons planted and with driftwood.
It has 7 adult mollies with probably 50 babies and 3 khuli loaches.


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[Matt68005]

Do you think it is a defect they have?

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If they are pintail and dying, it is a genetic defect. That happens to my guppy fry from time to time. I can offer that you could save them with methylene blue 5ml per ten gallons and an antibiotic treatment for 1 week. But you would just be contributing to the problem on down future generations. Poecillia seems to have a big "survival of the fittest" gene in their blood, and when you raise the in crisp clean aquariums and help the little sick ones grow to be adults and have their own babies, problems like this and bent spines arise.
However the disease im referring to is pintail on the fry. Almost fungal looking. It very well could be a parasite or some other disease that your fish have, i havent seen any pictures of them, so im not sure.
But from my own personal experience of 7 years with guppies and mollies....you can take a tank that use to have hundreds of sick dying guppy fry in it....just wash it out with the hose, then put molly fry in it, and they don't get the disease. So there is ALOT to be said about genetic weakness in heavily inbreed fish...sometimes its best just to raise as many as you can and let the weaker ones die off! Just like a fish farm would. Nitrates can be a contributing factor to this disease as well.

 

[katana]

I only have an ammonia test right now, and it's came out fine but I changed 50% anyway just in case.

The babies look normal and just suddenly die. I am assuming it is a genetic thing, especially if they are from the youngest Molly I have. She is a lyretail and not very bright if I can put it that way. I got two of those and her sister died from a panic attack (I walked past the tank and she got scared and freaked out and then floated...).


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