ariali said:
Well my tank is completely cycled, its a 20 gallon tank Theres plenty of vegetation as well as rocks to hide under and I am now left with only 4 black mollies since the mother who gave birth died after doing so and 3 silver 2sword tails 3 platues and 2 Raphaels. The male to female ratio for my black mollies is 2m and 2f for my silver ones its 1m 2f for the swordtails theyre both male and the platies are 1m and 2f. As for the striped Raphael I'm not sure what they are how can i tell?
Hum…first, can you tell us how long have you had this tank, how old the fish are, and how you cycled the tank? Can you also list your water parameters please?
Well, you have a couple of things are going on.
1) You are pretty heavily stocked, some of those fish will get over 2” and you have 14 of these fish. I was close to over stocked IMO with less than that in my 30g. Do you have plans to upgrade or maybe add another tank? You may experience more die-offs if the tank stays as crowded as it is. Plus, you have to account for all the fry you will have to house. But more on that later...
2) Sounds like when you bought swordtails you bought all males as only the males have ‘the sword tail.’ The females look just like platies/mollys. As mentioned above you need to keep the ratio in livebearers 1:3 female-male or else you will have huge aggression/stress problems. Either males will fight other males for dominance or females will become stressed to death by the males pursuing them to mate. Swordtails are by far the more ‘aggressive’ of the 3 types you have and will actively attack other males in the area. There is a change you male died due to stress from another more aggressive male, but until we know more about your set-up that would just be a guess. (Although I have seen males attack and take off pieces of other males’ tails, I assume this is to make them less attractive or more female looking to other fish, specifically breeding females?)
3) With so many livebearers you will have TONS of fry. They can give birth up to once a month every month and have as many as 20-60+ fry in a birthing PER FISH. You really need a plan for the fry. You can either let nature take its course and leave the fry to fend for themselves, or start setting up grow-out tanks now to house them. Just an FYI, most people will find out quickly that they can’t ‘sell’ the juvenile fish back to stores. Most stores won’t buy livebearers on principle, especially if there isn’t a clear delineation of parentage, which is the case for your fry. If they do, they prefer ‘pure’ stains as much as possible and pay piddly-squat. I was able to give a few away, give some to a LFS for in-store credit, but mostly my fry became food for other fish. As a result I stopped keeping them because I couldn’t let the babies go…
