Mollies in the Reef Tank

[Harrison Gordon]

For a few months, I have had mollies in a brackish setup at my school. Before long, there were teensy tiny fish scattered throughout the 50 gallon tank.

I know its ugly, but I was given a tight budget. Anyways, for the summer I have taken them home with me. Recently, they had about a hundred more babies!

Around this time I had been doing more research on them, and thought about putting them in my 75g reef tank. There are quite a few youtube videos on that. They are also known to eat algae, especially hair algae. this is their primary diet in the wild.

Well, I was considering it until I ended up with more babies than I could deal with. So I decided to plop one in the reef. In seconds, it was gone!
5 more in, all gone. No remains, nothing.

Well, I had an idea. For me it is a bit of a struggle to feed my fish a balanced, healthy diet without getting food all over the place. After all, my nitrates and phosphates have been a little up and down lately.

What if I were to breed mollies, solely for the purpose of feeding my reef fish? The idea here is this: the babies go in in larger quantities, and whatever gets eaten is wholly eaten, and whatever doesn't is still alive and not turning into nutrients in the water. Might this be a viable solution? Might it be healthy?
I could easily take brackish all the way to saltwater; I already use my reef's WCs and dilute it to make it brackish for the mollies.

What are your thoughts?
Should mollies just be used for eating algae, or for being eaten? I sure hope I can improve how I feed.....

Thanks!

Harrison

 

[Reeferdood]

Do you have groupers in there? When you put mollies in a full salt system you must slowly drip acclimate them (4+ hours).
We have them in the frag setup just for eating algae, they are awesome at it too.
Good luck with the others..

 

[Harrison Gordon]

Do you have groupers in there? When you put mollies in a full salt system you must slowly drip acclimate them (4+ hours).
We have them in the frag setup just for eating algae, they are awesome at it too.
Good luck with the others..

It's a community tank. And I would drip acclimate them for probably more than a day since some are pregnant.

I'm glad to hear you like them for eating algae! Do they eat everything or specific kinds?
How many and what size tank?

Thanks
Harrison

 

[mitch91175]

I put some sailfin mollies in my frag tank and honestly they haven't done nothing for eating my algae in there. Also, it didn't take long to acclimate them either. I temp acclimated them for about 10 minutes, put a cup of water from my display into the acclimation container, waited about 7 or so minutes then added them to the frag tank. They both are extremely happy campers, but aren't eating any algae like I'd expected.

 

[Bob Loblaw]

I have a pair in my 300 that were my "canaries" to make sure my fallow period was successful. They eat like pigs but only the frozen that the tank gets. The flow is too high for them to eat algae throughout the tank and they stay at the top rim of the tank. I assume they're breeding as one gets really fat every so often but I've never seen any babies. Figure they're consumed almost instantly.

 

[Reeferdood]

It's a community tank. And I would drip acclimate them for probably more than a day since some are pregnant.

I'm glad to hear you like them for eating algae! Do they eat everything or specific kinds?
How many and what size tank?

Thanks
Harrison

Specifically Hair algae they seem to like...

 

[riche]

I have a friend who has a few pair in his sump and he uses the baby’s as food for the main tank

 

[SashimiTurtle]

I've acclimated fw mollies to salt water by just dumping them in. Didn't lose a single mollie. They even reproduced in a few weeks. Moving back over to fresh water seemed to be a lot harder on them and I lost quite a few(all of them).