Day 288

Yesterday I found one of our balloon mollies stuck to our filter intake. She was breathing hard and it didn't look like she was gonna make it. I unstuck her from it and placed her in another part of the tank so she could rest on a plant and either recover, or die in peace.

I checked back on her about 10 minutes later and she was still in the same spot but this time upside down. I saw on her poop opening a little black bubble and I knew she was giving birth and they were stuck. Giving birth is the #1 cause of death in mollies.

So I scooped her into a bowl of water and gently gave her belly a squeeze and 8 babies popped right out. Nothing else seemed to be in there and it looked like a bit of her intestines were coming so I stopped. I put the babies in a floating nursery and put momma back in the tank to rest.

Another 10 minutes passed, and when I went to check on her again, she was dead I scooped her back into the bowl and gave her tummy another squeeze to make sure all the babies were out, after a bit more of her intestines came out, suddenly a whole whack of babies squirted out.

They totally looked dead and not breathing or moving. I thought for sure I had got them out too late, and was just going to dump them into the tank to be eaten by the other fish, but at the last minute I decided to put them in the floating nursery with the others so DH could see them when he got home.

Good thing I did, because when I went back to check on them later, almost all of them had come to life! I don't know how it works for baby fish, but I'm guessing their yolk sacs kept them alive.

Here is the first batch with momma fish

and this is how many we ended up with. I counted them all on this picture and came up with 61. Some are definitely dead, but I think at least 50 survived.