Balloon Mollies please resond soon!

Question
Well I was going threw your questions and saw that you know alot about mollies so I googled them and saw that that was the type of fish I had! So my question is what should I do about my molly having babies? I only have about a 6 or 7 gallon tank and they wont stop poping out!!! I only have two adult fish in the tank and I've had them for about 3 weeks. Should i just leave the babies in there and let them eat them and hope 1 or 2 live? (that sounds mean but i dont know what to do!)I have another tank but it is all agressive fish. Also I need to get a heater my water stays at 72 degrees...is there a kind that I can put inside the tank? because I just have a flat lid on the top of the tank? Wow this is long :)

Answer
Hey Tracey,
There is nothing wrong with not doing anything about the babies and just seeing who livges, not everyone has the time and space to breed fish =]. If you want some to live, get some fake plants and some rocks put tightly together in a section of the tank so the babies have a little place to hide. this is the best way to get babies to live to adulthood in the same tank. Of course, there will be adventurous ones that wander out and get eaten, but some will realize quickly that to survive they need to hide.  Your mollies will have babies about once a month and a half, and can have up to about sixty babies each time (normally much less, unless you have a really fat one...one time I had a seventy baby litter.) so having most die each time isn't necessarily a bad thing if you don't intend to breed.

if you wanted to raise the babies, you could buy another tank but you probably don't want to because you already have two.

there are plenty of tank heaters that go underwater in the tank. One thing I don't recommend is an Elite heater, I had one and it sort of "exploded" or melted at the bottom and made the temperature in the tank go up to over 110 degrees, killing my tank full of baby fish (probably around eighty fish). It was horrible. Ask an employee at the pet store to help you pick out a heater for your tank. if it looks like it won't work with your tank lid, you could cut a hole in the lid to fit the plug.

I would get a heater that has a temperature gauge, they are a little bit more expensive but work better in the long run. a good temperature is 75-80 degrees, and 72 isnt very far off.

i hope this info helps, feel free to ask anything else in the future that you might be wondering about. nothing wrong with a long question! actually, the longer they are the easier they are to answer becuase you know more about what needs to be answered. Some times I get questions that are so short they make no sense. =]

best wishes, i hope everything goes well with your tank! chelsey