Urgent - Tiny swimming things among Dalmation Mollie babies

[Laura]

Totally inexperienced with breeding. A dalmatian Mollie gave birth to 46 fry on Thanksgiving - neat to watch. We have them in a baby tank inside our 10 gallon aquarium. After a week or so I noticed this tiny tiny thing with eyes swimming among the baby fish. Probably 10 have died by now. Today there are 2 more dead fish, and now there are 4 of these tiny things swimming in the baby tank.
I called PetSmart, but they couldn't help. Is this a parasite? Should I suck them out of the baby tank and dispose of them? By the way, I'm feeding the fry "Fry Bites" by HBH Pet Products, as well as Wardley Small Fry liquid food. It makes a cloudy mess when you drop it in, but I presume they somehow eat it. We found one baby Mollie in the large tank about 2 months ago - must have been the only survivor from a previous pregnant fish. We had it in a baby tank until these latest were born. Since is was about the size of a large neon tetra, we put it into the tank with the bigger fish and it has done fine.

One more question - can I put an algae eater in the baby fish tank? I can see algae on the walls. Would it get enough to eat - I presume it would not bother the babies - does anyone know?

Thanks for any help and advice you can give me.

[lmw80]

do you have any other fish in the tank? Any better description of these tiny things...are they fish like? worm like?

[Laura]

These things are so small that even with a magnifying glass you can't make out much except eyes and a tiny body. I would say fishlike rather than wormlike. I couldn't even get very good pictures of the fry with my digital camera, so I know these things would never show up. Maybe 1/16 " long. Neither my husband nor I can come up with much description because they are so darned small.

We have other fish in the tank - 4 algae eaters, 3 Dalmation Mollies, 1 orange something (maybe a Mollie, maybe a swordtail without a tail - can't remember what we bought), 4 Neon Tetras and two Zebra Danios.
It's a 10 gallon tank. We've had fish for 30 years, just never become experts about it!

[willowthepoet]

if it's a dalmation molly, it could just be a particularly light one. when my guppy had her last drop, there were some that were so light you couldn't see anything besides eyes, and some that were almost black.

with a white molly baby, i can imagine only being able to see black eyes.

[Laura]

These are probably 1/16th of the size of the Dalmation babies, even at birth. They are still in there swimming around, but don't seem to get bigger. A local aquarium shop didn't know what they were over the phone, but said that parasites would be attached to the fish so that they were probably ok to leave in there. I just wish I knew what they were.

[Apocalypse_Gold]

Danios have ridiculously small babies, and they can take a long time to grow. It could be that your danios spawned and these few managed to make it into the baby tank and thus not get eaten. Another possibilty is that they are some small arthropod that may be residing in your tank, but probably not harmful. Do your little swimmers swim like normal fish or make crazy loops all over the place? I would skip the algae eater in the baby tank

[Laura]

They swim normally as far as I can tell.

[Apocalypse_Gold]

Parasites aren't designed to be great swimmers so they are usually all over the place, jerky movements, doing loops and never getting very far. Sounds like baby danios to me. The first time I saw them in a [acronym:9d9ce64df9="Partial water change"]pwc[/acronym:9d9ce64df9] bucket I thought they might be a parasite too.