Breeding Mollies - Question on Mixing Varieties

[Kilgore]

Hello,

I've been wondering, if I mix molly varieties (for example, black mollies and white sailfins, or maybe lyretails), will I end up with a weird blend of fry, or will the progeny appear as one type and just carry the recessive genes? Which traits are dominant, anyway?

Please let me know. I don't want to end up with freakish looking fish that my LFS can't take. Thanks!

[dskidmore]

If you want to breed nice looking fish with the least effort, get all the same variety of molly. If you cross-breed varieties, the results are unpredicitable.

[Kilgore]

Unpredictable, ok got it. One type per tank. Sad, but I kinda figured it was so. Still curious to know which traits are dominant/recessive. Although maybe it is like human skin, hair, and eyes, where blends are possible and depend on many different genes and alleles. Also, I know that swordtails and platies can hybridize, but will a swordtail try to mate with mollies, or vice versa, and are male mollies and swordtails likely to squabble? Let me know if you have the answers I seek.

[jcarlilesiu]

my yellow mollie was sexed by my red sword fin mollie and the outcome... mollies that are yellow with flat tail fins...

Also be prepared that one time they sex, the mother can have multiple "litters". My red sword mollie died nearly 8 months ago, and she is about ready to pop out her 3rd litter of fry.

[robertmarda]

A few years ago I did close to what you mentioned trying. I had a female while lyretail molly and a male molly. Me being inexperienced at the time and naive I figured if I bred them I would or could get dalmatian mollies. Wrong.

What I ended up with was mollies with mostly a light gray skin and black dots and splotches that were irregular and so not very pretty. Some were more black and darker than others. A few had the lyre tail but most did not. A few had cool patterns such as tiny black spots going horizontally from head to tail. But most were not very pretty. I gave some away and many of the others lived in my tanks until they died.

After that I got a male white lyretail and got lovely white lyretail mollies from the pair.

I haven't bred mollies for a while but am planning to start again.

[Puriti]

I have multiple colored mollies in my tank and they're not that bad. After personally breeding dalmatian and silver mollies, they dominant gene was silver not spotted. I love trying out the new genes of my mollies and am currently trying to make gold dust mollies by breeding a female creamsicle with my male dalmatian. They're all lyretail and I found that I got equal lyretail and rounded tail mollies which I found odd. Most of my spotted silver/dalmatian crosses were stunted growth mollies however, except for I think it was 2 females. Though the recent batch I had I had equal spotted and silver but the silver's still dominant

Also, when you're breeding different types of mollies, you're generally not creating too much of cross breeding because they're just different colorations more than different breeds. They have different scientific names but they're really not that much of a difference in genetics. It's like breeding dogs or horses in that it doesn't matter much because they're basically all the same. It's more or less what qualities you want in them but they're always going to just look like mollies just the colors or tails or size might differ.

[dskidmore]

Originally Posted by Puriti

Also, when you're breeding different types of mollies, you're generally not creating too much of cross breeding because they're just different colorations more than different breeds. They have different scientific names but they're really not that much of a difference in genetics.

There were originally three species of molly, all the rest are derivatives and crossbreeds of those three.

[Puriti]

Yeah I know, I saw that but I've never really had a problem with it since they're pretty much all the same X.x

[rollin_22]

i have some black lyretails, that are males, and some orange mollies which are female.... the majority ended up black, ]but a few are amazing, they have a orange head, and black body, they are wonderful