Why is my Mollie not growing?

lisaemc2

lisaemc2

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Feb 14, 2010
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Boston, MA. USA
I have 5 Mollies in my 10g tank. 3 of them I got before they were full grown. My Dalmation Lyre-Tail had babies & I kept 3 fry. One was born w/ all the parents characteristics. He's black w/ a ghost aura, has blue eyes, a lyre-tail & a sailfin. He got to a certain size then stopped growing. His brother & 2 sisters are in another tank w/ 2 Mollie adults. They have grown to near full size. Then, 2 generations later I keep another one of the fry. She's in the 1st tank. She's 3 months younger than him & has started to outgrow the poor little thing. He's a little more skittish than the others & seems to be more interested in having sex than eating. I don't think it has anything to do w/ my tank as the others are just fine. What else could it be? Behaviour problems? I really want him to grow up coz he looks amazing now & I want to see him in all his glory.

Help me out. :frog:
 
its like how there are people who are 3 feet tall and people who are almost 7 feet tall. there will always be genetic differences. I am sure that he is happy and fine being the little guy. In the wild, natural selection would have probably dictated that he would have been eaten by the bigger fish some time ago
 
lisa, the "rather have sex than eat" is a common characteristic of all male livebearers. :)

All I can think of to suggest is to put him in a separate tank by himself--at his size a little 1g Tetra or random betta tank would be fine--so that he gets every bit of food put in the tank without having to compete (or attempt to mate with) anybody else. This would at least assure that the problem is not lack of nutrition.

Otherwise he may just be a runt. Every generation seems to get a few of those. Usually they are stunted because of some internal problem and die relatively soon, either on their own or because the owner culls them. But I suspect some are just naturally genetically destined to be small. If I had the facilities I would love to specialize in these, either molly or platy or especially angelfish. A breed of mini versions of any of these fish would seem to have a future as a valuable sale/trade item, given the growth of interest in nano and desktop-size aquariums.

Good luck with your dal, he sounds awesome. Keep us updated on how he does. :)
 
Good news, he must've heard me. He's feeding more & has started to bully the other male in the tank which is 4x his size. Somehow he's stopped being so skittish. This all came about when I put a cuttle bone in for my snails. Doubt there's a correlation. This makes me happy. I'm about to move in 2 wks & having one less neurosis is always a good thing.
 
I've heard that some male fish that spawn before reaching a certain size will be stunted.

Not sure if that's true, but I had a male guppy that completely stopped growing once he started spawning w/ the females. He was extremely tiny. Something hormonally can supposedly stunt them.
I've also had this happen with convicts. They started spawning very young and never grew much more, whereas the related fish at the pet store that were separated by sex got bigger.
I know many people also say to separate discus once they hit a certain size to prevent them from trying to spawn too young and becoming stunted.

There's also genetic variations in size, as others mentioned. I've had fish from the same group that grew normally and then others that never got very big even though they were in the same water and fed exactly the same.
 
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