Mollys

[FishFanatic13]

hi just a quick question but do mollys eat there own babys
and guppy and platy fry

 

[Luzi]

Yep, mollies are relatively big fish and will eat anything that can fit into their mouths

 

[FishFanatic13]

ok then thanks

 

[Pixietina]

ive not issues with mine shes been with her fry for a few days now

 

[Grimcoll]

Ive never had any problems with the normal black mollys eating their own fry , they have always lseft them alone and never shown any interest in chasing them .

 

[OldMan47]

Mollies do indeed eat fry but are not voracious fry eaters. I raised many nice molly drops with their mother with no trouble at all but the second drop never did not have the survival rate of the first drop. The problem is simple. The second drop thought they were safe because they were surrounded by the fry from the first drop. The second drop ended up losing more fry because they were not as cautious of the adult female. She kept on munching fry when the opportunity presented itself although she never did chase her fry much.
As Grimcoll has observed, you will find surviving fry in a colony of black mollies but I doubt you will ever see the 30 to 40 fry that a typical drop will produce. Instead, I found that I often saw about 10 to 15 black molly fry survive and thrive when that is what I was keeping in a tank. I do know what happened to the rest.
The question we must answer as fish keepers is how many fry we really want. In the wild you will find on average exactly one fry surviving for each parent fish, that is why the world is not over-run with any particular species of fish. We keep fish in a rather strange environment that lets us change that ratio but how far we change it is up to us.