Fish Update!

It’s been at least a couple of weeks since I’ve updated on the fish tank and I thought I was due!

Awhile back, we were down to one male silver molly. We started with black mollys, silver mollys and dalmatian mollys. He was our lone survivor out of all of them. Eventually I thought he was lonely and needed a girlfriend. We searched and searched and if we found any silver mollys at all, they were boys not girls. Finally, we found four little girls that we thought our male would love. We were excitedly awaiting babies!

When you buy the mollys they are very young. It takes a few months for them to mature and we were waiting patiently, as was our male. We were finally rewarded a couple of weekends ago with our first sighting of tiny silver molly babies! It seems that when our platys have babies, the babies are very good at hiding. Our first sightings of the platys are when the babies are about ½ inch long or so. These mollys were tinier than that! And they were everywhere. That didn’t last long as we spent that first weekend watching all of our other fish feeding on the babies. The first one was is hard to watch. After that, it got to be "oops, there went another one". We had to lose about 40 or 50 babies that first weekend.

I don’t want to do breeder tanks. I want nature to take its course and what survives was meant to survive. So far that has kept our tank in some sort of check (as well as keeping our angel fish, the biggest baby eater, fat and happy!) as we end up with maybe one baby per hatching or whatever you call it.

That might have changed. While the molly babies are very brave and out into the middle of the tank to get eaten easily, somehow a bunch of them have survived. We now have at least eight babies in the tank right now! And they are fast little suckers and getting bigger every day. We’ve watched other fish chase them but so far, these new babies are winning.

All of that fish loving must have been too much on our original male as he curled up under a rock and died before we noticed the first babies. What a way to go though, huh? We did get one male along with the four females so now the girls won’t be lonely.

Recently, we’ve been talking about more fish. I kind of want to try to put more angel fish in there as I think our one angel needs a companion. Ron’s not so sure about that idea. We put a lot of money into angel fish that didn’t last a week. Luckily, I was on travel that week so I didn’t have to see Ron take all of those fish out of the tank.

We’ll see what happens. For now, the tank is still bringing us a lot of enjoyment. At least enough enjoyment right now to make it worth cleaning all of the poop out of the tank! Once that joy is gone, you can bet the tank will be gone, baby fish or no baby fish.