Surprise molly fry!! Help!

So I recently moved my new female balloon mollies into their new tank, and today my mom noticed a few (~6) babies in the quarantine tank!

This is my first time dealing with babies. Can someone please tell me how old they look, and what to feed them? Also, at what age can you see if they're male or female?

(I speceifically returned a male I accidentally purchased because I didn't want any babies... The main tank is a 29 gallon planted tank, currently has 3 female bm's, 4 tetra cardinals, and a pleco).

 

I breed guppies, not molly. That said, I believe those look to be 3-5 days developmentally assuming they grow at a similar rate. If they made it this far your tank must have had the ideal amount of gunk/mulm built up in the right places. If you aren't going to get serious about breeding them, just grind some flakes super tiny between your fingers, then rub it off your fingers underwater to get it to sink/not go into the filter. One flake, half dime size, will easily feed 2 of them per feeding for the first couple weeks so a pinch sound do it. Try to feed twice a day of you can find the time in the mornings. Feed 3 times a day if you have nothing better to do, but feed a little less. There will be more food waste feeding this way so watch your parameters, but it will work. If you get into breeding you may want to grow/culture some fry specific food, but many do it with flakes and other common fish food ground up small and it works out fine.

Congrats on the new water babies.

 

Hi, congrats on becoming a parent, the babies are super cute! They look to be only a few days old. You can only determine their gender after a few months. First off, you're going to want to isolate the babies from the rest of the tank, because they will be eaten. For the first 2-3 weeks, they'll do alright in a breeder box, which you can buy at a pet store for about $10. Then, they'll most likely need their own tank, at least a 5 gallon, with a filter, lights, etc. You can probably find a bunch of kits out there that would work good.

Since they're very young, their food options are pretty limited. You can crush up regular food into super super small pieces and soak them in water, but a lot of the time they are still too small to eat regular food. What I fed mine was egg yolk. You take a very small piece of hard-boiled egg yolk, soak it in water for a few minutes, and just dump it in there. They love it, and I've noticed it helps them grow faster, too. Brine shrimp, daphnia, and infusoria are also good.

You also need to do ~20% water changes every day, as fry are extremely sensitive to polluted water. But it's a lot of work just to maintain a few babies, so if you get anymore in the future, and you don't really care about them, just leave them in the tank, and let nature take its course. 1 or 2 of the strongest ones will survive, and might survive to adulthood. And for the current ones, I personally wouldn't buy a tank just for them unless you want to. You can keep them in the breeder box for 3-4 weeks, and at that point they will be big enough to live in the main tank without getting eaten. You can keep them in there for a few months.

But you can't keep all nine mollies in the tank along with the tetras and pleco permanently, as that would overstock the tank. If it were me, I would just keep them in the qt tank until they grow up, and if they all survive, sell them or set up a new tank for them. A better solution would be to add 3 or 4 more cardinal tetras, and keep 1 or 2 mollies that you like the most, and sell the rest of them. Good luck! Ask more questions if you have them!

 

Thankfully I have a vacant 4 gallon that will hopefully do it for them! What I'm planning is leaving the females and giving away the males as soon as I can tell the sexes apart (I have a friend who is willing to take the males).

Will I be able to tell the males and females apart before they start breeding? Also, approximately when will it happen?

 

Thankfully I have a vacant 4 gallon that will hopefully do it for them! What I'm planning is leaving the females and giving away the males as soon as I can tell the sexes apart (I have a friend who is willing to take the males).

Will I be able to tell the males and females apart before they start breeding? Also, approximately when will it happen?

I'm not 100% sure, but according to this article, male mollies become reproductive at about 12 months of age, while females become reproductive at 6 months of age. So you shouldn't have any problems with breeding.

 

I'm not 100% sure, but according to this article, male mollies become reproductive at about 12 months of age, while females become reproductive at 6 months of age. So you shouldn't have any problems with breeding.

Just read the article. Well, they've mentioned it as a generalization. Before this line , it also says "the reproduction age varies from every kind of mollies". But with most common known mollies, the age does differ per individual molly (no matter male or female). Goes as well for wild ones. And males and females can already be sexual mature way sooner as mentioned in the article. But in general, they'll be smaller in size. But I believe that the one who wrote this article is mistaken by the fact that the ages mentioned is about when they're fully developed in size. Especially, males with a potential higher dorsal need a serious time period to develop a high dorsal. And most females are already done with growing after six months.