Will Mollies live in tropical water?

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lukepfoster

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Apr 7, 2010
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Will Mollies live in tropical water?

I currently have them in brackish and want to change the setup of my tank. can I introduce tropical fish to the brackish conditions or can the mollies live in a tropical setup?
 
assuming that your brackish fish are standard monos, scats, archers, etc. they are tropical fish too, so the temperature won't be a big problem
 
I also live in Florida, which is in the Tropics. We have wild molly's here. (The water is actually considered soft.)
 
i have a few mollies in a 10 gallon tank with a ph of 7-7.3 and have never added any salts i dont see why you cant
 
I should caution you on my own experience. I received some mollies that were several generations bred in soft water. They were fine as they were, but I wanted to maximize their breeding potential, so I slowly took them to light non-marine salt, hard-water pseudo-brackish. SG was only about 1.002/1.003. They did well and grew a lot in this set-up. Later, I played musical tanks and took them back to soft fresh over the course of a week doing small water changes with normal dechlorinated tapwater. Once I moved them into my 55g tank, though, they began to show signs of stress. Fins clamping and small white areas appearing in their slime coat. I gave them a dip in full-strength marine mix and they recovered completely, but I have no idea if/when I'll have to repeat the process. So go easy on the transition from brackish to fresh. Seems to be a tougher change than fresh to salt. At least, for those few young fish in my own care.
 
It could just be the hardness of the water in my area, but all of my attempts at switching mollies to straight freshwater from brackish through acclimation has ended in every one dying.
 
One of mine died, the rest are fine now. So I guess the take-home message is to take it very slowly when converting them.
 
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