Please Help! My Baby Molly Fish Are Dying!!!

Hi. I’m New here and new to having fish. To make a long story short three weeks ago, we promised our children that we will get fish and we did! My husband bought a 10 gallon fish tank and for Molly fish. No one told us we needed to let the water sit for a few days.. Two of them died. I bought two new adults and one looks sick. He did condition the water before putting the new fish in the tank though. Two days later, we had 18 fry. We only have six fry left. I just scooped 3 out that were dad. We have a little floater tank. I’m reading about these fish and I’ve realize that this is so much more complicated than we thought! My husband and I don’t really have a lot of time to take care of fish and we really don’t know what to do. It’s very upsetting that they are all dying. Can anyone help me?

 

Mollies need a heater to keep the water between 78 - 82 degrees, and a decent filter because they can make quite a mess of their water.
Mollies are live breeders so they will certainly fill out the tank again to help replace the lost ones. If you can get a water testing kit, that would help to determine if it's the water killing the fish, temperature, or some other factor. Setting up a take is the most time consuming part, but once you get things sorted out, mollies are pretty easy to take care of.

 

Greetings and welcome to fishlore

There are several things that you need to be made aware of.


1. Before you do anything else please read and understand the information in this link
READ FIRST: Freshwater Beginner Important Topics

Pay very close attention to the thread on the nitrogen cycle. It is critical.

2. Letting the water sit for a few days MAY remove the chlorine from tap water but I am not sure about chloramine in water.

3. You need a quality test kit. I recommend this >

4. A ten gallon is far too small for mollies. They get much bigger than most people think when full grown. This silver is 3 and 1/2 inches long and still growing.



Our gold dust and marble are 3 inches long and will get bigger as they are still young. Sailfins get even bigger.

As Remonalynn said these fish need heated water and very good filtration. I keep all our aquariums at or above 10x the water column in flow per hour. Do not go by the box saying what aquarium it is good for, rather look at the GPH (gallon per hour) flow rating.

5. Mollies are sensitive to nitrates.

6. If you do not plan to keep live plants you can add aquarium salt to the water and they will benefit from that. Salt is hard on most aquatic plants.

7. Water changes are a budding fish keepers best friend (next to Fishlore )

Look around the site. There is a wealth of information here.

best wishes

 

sense those fish are already in the tank I recommend seachem prime. to temporaily make ammonia safe. it won't get rid of ammonia but that's good because you needa ammonia to cycle. I read the cycle thread a while back and definetly recommend it.

most of us have been in you're situation so don't worry. there are people here to help.

 

Thank you so much! Oh. My. Goodness. I have a lot to read. We’ve really messed up. Yep, the fish are already in the tank.

 

Follow Thunder_o_b advice.
And I will highlight his "DAILY WATER CHANGES".

I too had a batch of approx three dozen molly fry born in last week of august, and by far only lost 2 of them (they had light brown color instead of black), and fed one to my betta (he had a bent spine and was not likey to survive).

Currently all fry are in a 12 liter box with no substrate and few stones to have a hiding space, and I do daily partial water changes, along with poop removal using airline tubing.

I had added salt at start. Now I am reducing the salinity gradually. Its been two weeks now and I need two- three more days to get salitny back to zero.
PH is neutral.
I hope this helps.