Tales from the Tank #8

Caution: Material Contained Below May Not Be Suitable for Young Readers!
In this edition of today's update, we have successfully created a nice community of fish in the 40 gallon tank. Although we successfully added more fish, Terry kept wondering why the large male black Dalmatian Mollie kept chasing the smaller female white & black Dalmatian Mollie. After repeated questions to various fish /pet store employees, the consensus is clear:  He's just trying to "get a little" from the female in his life. Sound familiar?

Apparently having just one female to male ratio is not good in a community tank.  The male will never leave the poor female alone and according to the local pet store, the poor thing can have up to three pregnancy's at one time. YIKES!  Alas, she is getting fat again...so we think she is expecting.  Makes sense since the male never leaves her alone. 

So it's no wonder that the other day I finally saw a baby Mollie.  So I was so excited - instead of being "Grandcats" to Jared and Ashley's Chance, we were going to be fish Grandparents. OMG...so off to the pet store we went to get a breeder net.  You use breeder nets to separate the females from the males so the other fish don't eat the 'fry' before they get a chance to reach the safety of cover (such as the live plants we've added and some extra ground cover so they can hide).  Haven't seen it since, so I'm thinking the sharks had a juicy midnight snack.

Terry has been very diligent in his quest to learn all there is about freshwater fish in our tank.  Just this week he read that a 1:1 ratio is not good for the mollies. You actually need to have more females in the tank than males, otherwise the females are never left alone - which we have seen first hand.  

So off to the pet store we went....and came home with four females. Two dalmation mollies and two of the red swordtail mollies so the males we added a while ago have something to do instead of chase each other.  LOL.

A bit later, we were observing the activity and the black male mollie seemed to be swimming around aimlessly and rubbing his head against the bridge and acting weird. Terry said "I wonder what's wrong with him?". To which I replied "Well, there are more fish in the sea to choose from now". 

Apparently we are now promoting "fishing" around...