# Livebearers are Becoming Weaker.



## CoryWM (Mar 26, 2008)

If you've been having problems with the common type livebearers, you are not alone. I myself went through this the past year or so. Keeping many "hard to keep" fish species, and yet I couldn't keep mollies, platies, swordtails, and guppies alive?!

Through many hours of research and other hobbyist help, I found the cause to be how they are commercially raised. The cement ponds that are used to breed livebearers in leach into the water raising the pH and hardness. Unfortunately for me I have very soft water, this was stressing my newly acquired livebearers to no end. No matter how much attention I payed them I couldn't get them to live. Simply dismissing it as too "inbred". While many livebearers have been downbred, my luck did a 180 as soon as I raised the hardness of the water in the livebearer tanks.

For a more in depth read and pictures, you can check out the article on my blog: http://www.tankgeek.com/2011/02/11/livebearers-weaker


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## decal (Jul 27, 2010)

Most livebearers are actually hard water fish. Along with African cichlids they're one of the few types of fish that really need hard water to thrive. I catch wild sailfin mollies all of the time in the Houston area, an area with very hard water. The specimens I find in bayous (fresh, hard water) tend to max out at 2", whereas in Galveston Bay (brackish water) I find monsters 4" or more to be common. So the commercial culture conditions you describe are actually pretty good for them.

I wish I had your soft water! It's a real struggle trying to remove GH without RO. Puts a nix on breeding a lot of dwarf cichlids. You should be able to up the hardness with epsom salts.


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## asukawashere (Mar 11, 2009)

decal said:


> Most livebearers are actually hard water fish. Along with African cichlids they're one of the few types of fish that really need hard water to thrive. I catch wild sailfin mollies all of the time in the Houston area, an area with very hard water. The specimens I find in bayous (fresh, hard water) tend to max out at 2", whereas in Galveston Bay (brackish water) I find monsters 4" or more to be common. So the commercial culture conditions you describe are actually pretty good for them.
> 
> I wish I had your soft water! It's a real struggle trying to remove GH without RO. Puts a nix on breeding a lot of dwarf cichlids. You should be able to up the hardness with epsom salts.


+1 on the hard water. Most livebearers enjoy harder water conditions (which is probably why my endler colony has thrived here for years in our local "liquid rock"). Many are native to coastal, brackish waters which have very alkaline conditions.... mollies especially are a euryhaline species (able to live in both freshwater and marine conditions). Cement leeching isn't going to hurt them.

Rather, I mostly attribute the problems with livebearers in recent years to inbreeding. This is especially the case with the showier, selectively bred fish (gold dust mollies, fancy guppies, etc.). I know many of the best, prize-winning molly breeders in the country live in Texas, because they can go collect wild stock to cross their domesticated mollies back to in order to improve their gene pool. This is not a practice the commercial breeders use - rather, they keep line breeding fish with a very narrow gene pool, resulting in weaker animals. Which is especially a shame when you consider that many wild-type livebearers are gorgeous little critters that don't really need "improvement."

CoryWM, if you think your soft water is stressing your fish, modify it with the addition of crushed coral and/or a bit of aquarium salt. If you want to have a planted tank, stick to species that will tolerate hard/brackish conditions (Anubias, Vallisneria, mosses, Microsorum, etc. are all able to adjust to such water).

decal, I have similar hard water problems. I adjust the water for my discus and other softwater fish by using Turface as a substrate in their tanks. The high CEC tends to leech dissolved solids right out of the water - you have to replace it every once in awhile (the harder your water the more frequent the replacement), but it's cheap so that's not a huge issue. Certainly less expensive than getting an RO unit big enough to handle all my tanks.


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