A Fry Disaster!

[Kevinator]

I woke up this morning to check on my pregnant balloon molly to see if she dropped any fry(she didn't) and I found a horrid site! In our breeding chamber we had up to 45 fry. Approx. 15 balloon mollies and 30 guppy fry where in there. When I looked in there all but 1 balloon molly fry and about 9 guppy fry were still alive! I immediatly got the dead fry out. They were all at different ages. My oldest fry were Mollies which were about 3 weeks old then another set of mollies which were about 2 weeks and the guppies were 1 week old. When I went to take them out I noticed that their guts were hanging out.

I have had a problem with cloudiness the past couple of weeks and I have made 3 water changes in the past week including a 50 percent change last night. Could of this caused this? I have only been feeding them 2 to 3 times a day so I don't think over feeding was a problem. I can't check my stats because I am out of the stuff I check it with. I have only added the normal chemicals that I do during a water change.

Can anyone help me solve this mystery

 

[theotheragentm]

What color is the cloudiness? Cloudiness that is white is often a bacteria bloom. Who were you feeding 2-3 times a day? There should never be leftover food. Adult fish should be fed once a day, and I even skip a day every week once in a while. If you were feeding tiny amounts of food, 2-3 times a day shouldn't have been a problem for your fry, but like I said no food should have been left over.

Did you treat the water before you added it back to the tank, also matching temperature? Huge differences in water quality may have caused this.

As far as the condition of the bodies, these fish don't try to eat each other alive, but they will take advantage of a dead fish as a meal. That is probably what you saw.

 

[Kevinator]

What color is the cloudiness? Cloudiness that is white is often a bacteria bloom. Who were you feeding 2-3 times a day? There should never be leftover food. Adult fish should be fed once a day, and I even skip a day every week once in a while. If you were feeding tiny amounts of food, 2-3 times a day shouldn't have been a problem for your fry, but like I said no food should have been left over.

Did you treat the water before you added it back to the tank, also matching temperature? Huge differences in water quality may have caused this.

As far as the condition of the bodies, these fish don't try to eat each other alive, but they will take advantage of a dead fish as a meal. That is probably what you saw.

Yes it was a white cloudiness and we have had the problem before but it went a way after a while, here lately; however it hasn't and it has been an on going problem for the past month.

We only feed the adults once a day and the fry 2-3 times a day in small amounts with fry food.

I did treat the water before I put it in the tank. I am not sure about the temrature though I never had checked it. Could it have been a sudden difference in water temps?

The fry were in a breeder chamber by themselves.

 

[bubblej17]

if your water was to hot or to cold then yes you may have shocked your fry, always try to match the water temp before adding it back into your tank, sorry for you losses

 

[modaz]

if you mean the chamber as in floater where you keep fry safe then you had too many fry in there at one go and the age diffence between the fry is too large, 3 weeks old mollies are much larger than 1 week old guppy and they should be housed in a spereate tank with the room to move, having a large amount of fry in the chamber will result in the waste from the excess feeding being isolated to that one area and you can find that the water conditions in the chamber are different to the actual tank. with dead or week fry in there the others would just make a mea of them and this is most likely to be why their inside were hanging out.

the cloudiness = check you filter and do some maintence on it to release any blockages etc... this could be the problem with white cloud also as stated above reduce feeding on your adults.

good luck with your tank and surviving fry