Ocellaris40
Community Member
My desire for mollies was multi-fold. 1. I needed a voracious algae eaters - which I read on R2R that they love filementous algae - great, because after 6 months of running, I finally got the ugly stage. 2. friendly, community fish who wouldn't be bullies. I picked up 5 (1 male, 4 female) from a local petsmart - after explaining how to sex them to the petsmart employee, who advised she had no idea.
I read numerous forum posts and watched youtube videos, and virtually all stated that they had mortalities. One key commonality between all, is that everyone seemed to go pretty quickly in their acclimation (inside of a single day), and in my opinion it was primarily stress that killed them in these circumstances. I had some human error, but shockingly, still did not result in any fatalities, at least so far.
The setup: 20G Long tank filled with a mixture of tap and RODI water, air stone, heater, PVC pipes for hide in, and filter with no media. Just prior to fish i added a bottle of bacteria (Tetra was the brand, and only one available at LFS) and I bought 5 dalmation mollies (3.99 ea.) which were also suggested as being some of the hardier ones.
Day 1-2: temperature acclimate mollies and let them chill. They were very skiddish at first, which prompted me to just feed and let chill.
Day 3: Remove ~2 gallons, add~2 gallon bucket with salt content of ~1.070 with extrememly slow drip
Day 4: remove ~2 gallons, repeat - add prime + ~2 gallons hypersaline salt
Day 5: remove ~2 gallons repeat - add prime + ~2 gallons hypersaline salt
Day 6: remove ~5 gallons add water with salt content of ~1.040
Day 7: add ~2 gallons of normal saline ( 1.025) saltwater
Remove fish, drip acclimate over ~1 hour, removing 1/2 bucket contents half way through.
One snafu I had, when i was removing water somewhere between day 4-5, I accidentally sucked up one of the mollies, and hadn't seen her - because I was dosing prime, i was reusing water as i moved towards adding lower salt-content water, and dumped the bucket from that water "change" into another bucket that contained the extremely high salt content water. Noticing after probably around 20 minutes, i scooped her up with my hands and ran her back to the tank and dropped her in. within about 20 minutes she began behaving normally again, - i dosed Metro worried she had salt burns and might run the risk of infection.
The above figures are rough estimates - but i would check salinity daily, and only went up by about 0.005 per day when adding salt to slow the acclimation process. Anyway, thought I'd add this experience to the anecdotal data out there. I'll update if I have any additional snafu's, or if all is good I'll also relay.
They're now in a 40g breeder w/ 2 clowns, 1 royal gramma, and 1 neon blue goby.
I read numerous forum posts and watched youtube videos, and virtually all stated that they had mortalities. One key commonality between all, is that everyone seemed to go pretty quickly in their acclimation (inside of a single day), and in my opinion it was primarily stress that killed them in these circumstances. I had some human error, but shockingly, still did not result in any fatalities, at least so far.
The setup: 20G Long tank filled with a mixture of tap and RODI water, air stone, heater, PVC pipes for hide in, and filter with no media. Just prior to fish i added a bottle of bacteria (Tetra was the brand, and only one available at LFS) and I bought 5 dalmation mollies (3.99 ea.) which were also suggested as being some of the hardier ones.
Day 1-2: temperature acclimate mollies and let them chill. They were very skiddish at first, which prompted me to just feed and let chill.
Day 3: Remove ~2 gallons, add~2 gallon bucket with salt content of ~1.070 with extrememly slow drip
Day 4: remove ~2 gallons, repeat - add prime + ~2 gallons hypersaline salt
Day 5: remove ~2 gallons repeat - add prime + ~2 gallons hypersaline salt
Day 6: remove ~5 gallons add water with salt content of ~1.040
Day 7: add ~2 gallons of normal saline ( 1.025) saltwater
Remove fish, drip acclimate over ~1 hour, removing 1/2 bucket contents half way through.
One snafu I had, when i was removing water somewhere between day 4-5, I accidentally sucked up one of the mollies, and hadn't seen her - because I was dosing prime, i was reusing water as i moved towards adding lower salt-content water, and dumped the bucket from that water "change" into another bucket that contained the extremely high salt content water. Noticing after probably around 20 minutes, i scooped her up with my hands and ran her back to the tank and dropped her in. within about 20 minutes she began behaving normally again, - i dosed Metro worried she had salt burns and might run the risk of infection.
The above figures are rough estimates - but i would check salinity daily, and only went up by about 0.005 per day when adding salt to slow the acclimation process. Anyway, thought I'd add this experience to the anecdotal data out there. I'll update if I have any additional snafu's, or if all is good I'll also relay.
They're now in a 40g breeder w/ 2 clowns, 1 royal gramma, and 1 neon blue goby.
