can mollies and platys or swordtails breed?

[afireinside]

ya know what would be a sweet fish combo, a black molly with the sword tail, no wait, a black balloon molly sword tail combo, think of it, a black and red fish with a puffy belly and a sword tail.

 

[ScoutCarcer]

ya know what would be a sweet fish combo, a black molly with the sword tail, no wait, a black balloon molly sword tail combo, think of it, a black and red fish with a puffy belly and a sword tail.

 

[Koms151]

Hello all,

I have 2 sets of molly platy crosses. I set up a 20 gallon about a year ago for my blue freshwater lobster and added some platies along with one female molly who was pregnant. Well, she had a set of babies and 2 females survived. I gave the mother away to a friend along with some platy babies that I had and only had these molly females with platies. They're not quite a year old and had 2 sets of molly/platy babies. The babies are all different. Some look like tiger striped platies and some look like mollies. The older ones are about 3/4 of an inch now and the younger ones are still tiny. I have 2, 55 gallon tanks that I'd love to seperate them into but I've got large severums, parrots, and a huge 4 line pictus which would probably eat them. I'm not sure what I'll do with them but if anyone has any info on these crosses please let me know. For now, I'm waiting on them to grow some more and maybe find homes for some of them.

Hope this answers your question as to if they can cross. I didn't think it was possible either.....

Stacie

 

[wrs]

It is not possible. Your mollies got pregnate when they were younger by male brothers. Interbreeding can produce some odd colored fish.

 

[Koms151]

Well I'm not going to argue about it but heres the thing. There were only 2 females that survived from tiny tiny babies. I HAD NO male mollies with these two females. Thats why I kept them so I wouldn't have more babies in a crowded tank. I know it sounds impossible but thats the facts.

Stacie

 

[sylvia]

Do you have pictures?

Mollies and platies simply cannot cross-breed. They are completely different fish, not closely related, not even from the same genus. Even if the fish 'mated', no fry would be produced. They would not be viable. There is a different explanaiton for this.

 

[Synirr]

Do you have pictures?

Mollies and platies simply cannot cross-breed. They are completely different fish, not closely related, not even from the same genus. Even if the fish 'mated', no fry would be produced. They would not be viable. There is a different explanaiton for this.

I agree. Fish can do all kinds of weird things when it comes to producing fry, such as parthenogenesis (virgin birth,) or sperm storage, but mollies and platies, no matter how hard they may try, simply cannot produce fry together. It's like mating a horse with a cow; it just doesn't work that way.

Edit: You didn't mention whether or not you had platies of both sexes? That would be the simplest explanation right there

 

[paulthegreat]

I think we should try to get back to the root fish instead of finding new ways to get hybrid bastards. Can we try to back breed to find the original colors or am I just nostalgic?

 

[Koms151]

OK, I'm a 33 year old nurse investigating a 20 gallon tank of fish. sheesh. Anyhow, here's what I did tonight. I asked a friend of mine who knows a fish store owner about this. Well, he lives 2 miles away from me and they came over (without calling first)........anyhow.....He, the owner, is now going to do some research on this. He scooped all of the bigger babies out of the tank and looked at each one carefully in a glass. Some as I allready said look like mollies and some like platies. One really strange thing is that they (the babies) are ALL females. I hadn't noticed until he mentioned it. Another thing is that 3 babies have a slight pattern of a mickey mouse platy on their tails (I have 2 male mickey mouse platies). Most of the molly looking babies are brown and 5 are white or white with flecks. The platy babies are mostly grey but have blue coloration in them (the color of the mickey mouse males). He said they are slightly over an inch, I say a little smaller. Look, I have male platies and these 2 female mollies in this tank and thats it. I really only wanted something to swim about and not be an expensive loss if my blue crawdad caught them. Maybe there is another answer to this but I can't see it. If anyone has any information on people who tests genetics of fish and would be interested, I'd be glad to give some away. There's a total of 26 older and about 20 tiny babies.

I'll try to get better pictures. I tried and they were all a blurr.....

 

[wrs]

huh, I think you have the amzon molly. They make babies without ever having internal fertilization, and all the fry are always females.

 

[Synirr]

All females you say? That would be one side-effect of parthenogenesis, since the animal is basically cloning itself, but the different colourations would be harder to explain in that case. If you live near a university, you could try asking an ichthyologist about it. If they couldn't give you a solid theory right away, I'm sure they'd be interested and could help you find some answers. If you do have molly-platy hybrids, which I highly doubt, then yours would no doubt be the very first reported case of it and would probably result in a lot of questions to be answered.

Edit: I'm a huge biology nerd so I did a little research on parthenogenesis in mollies and found this site, which has an account of female mollies being injected with sperm from mosquitofish. This apparently induced the mollies to produce offspring parthenogenically, since the resulting fry had no mosquitofish DNA whatsoever. Perhaps the platies attempting to mate with the mollies had the same effect in your tank? I also figured out that the offspring being different colours than the parents could fairly easily be explained by recessive genes... big DUH on my part

 

[sylvia]

Or you could go for the much simpler explanation as to why they are apparently female - livebearer males develop the gonopodium later in life as they mature. They all start out with a fan-shaped anal fin that resembles that of a female. This could not be a case of the female(s) cloning themselves - the fry would all have to be identical to the mother. You say they vary in color (which simply means they inherited genes carried by their original parents and need not point towards the fish in your tank being their predessors at all (just cause a fish has stripes - for example - doesn't mean the fry will as well). They can carry recessive traits which don't show up until the fish is homozygous for that characteristic (carries two copies of the allele responsible for that characteristic). You also said the fry look either like platies or like mollies. I'm curious as to whether you ever had female platies in this tank? As you have female mollies, and they can carry sperm for several months, that would solve the mystery of how molly fry appeared without a male but how you can have platies as well, I still can't imagine (unless you somehow miss-identified one of your fish - which I doubt - or had a female in there at some stage and just missed the fry).

 

[Synirr]

Or you could go for the much simpler explanation as to why they are apparently female - livebearer males develop the gonopodium later in life as they mature. They all start out with a fan-shaped anal fin that resembles that of a female. This could not be a case of the female(s) cloning themselves - the fry would all have to be identical to the mother.

That's true... I'm sure there's a much simpler explanation than parthenogenesis, but apart from sperm-storage or mis-identification of sex, that's about the only thing I could come up with
It's unlikely, but I just thought I'd throw it out there for the heck of it.

Interestingly, and I couldn't find any info on this on the net so if anyone knows differently please correct me, but I don't think all parthenogenic offspring necessarily have to be exact genetic clones of the mother. The mother carries two copies of each chromosome, but each egg she produces only carries one copy (the other copy to be provided by the sperm). If the eggs were stimulated to develop into offspring without being fertilized, to be viable, they would have to replicate their single set of chromosomes into two sets. This would produce offspring that were homozygous for all traits they carry, and due to the interplay of dominance and recessiveness of genes, they would not necessarily resemble the mother.
Again, though, I'm not sure that's even possible... I couldn't find any information specific enough to answer that question for me