mollies lay eggs? please clue me in on this one. i thought all mollies were livebearers. i do agree that swordtails will breed with them. how large are your mollies? are they sailfins?

I was under the impression they lay eggs, but after leaving this site, I did a bit of research and yes they are livebearers...that being the case, this little mama has had a hell of a lot of babies in the past 5 months. All of the offspring are silver in color with the black spots. Along with the original 3 adult fish we now have approximately 30 newbies of various sizes...the largest of the offspring are approximately 3/4 inch long...I can't imagine them all surviving in this tank once they reach maturity...is this assumption correct? Should I add an additional tank? I don't want these little characters to start dying before I realize I have an overcrowding issue.
I have been looking for pictures of Mollies to find out whether she is a sailfin...I have been unsuccessful in locating one...what does a sailfin look like? Can you recommend a site where I could identify the type of mollie she is? Thanks

i dn't know of any sites offhand. i think it is the male that displays the sailfin, but she would carry the dna for it. i asked about sailfins because i think they get much larger than swordtails, which would be considered in how many the tank could support. do you have a "mom and pop" pet store around you? thse are my fave. many will accept your extra fish in trade. chain pet stores in my experience will not.
option2- see if your area has freecycle set up www.freecycle.org . if not, you can start one by offering free fish. worst case- food for larger fish. sorry to suggest that, but sometimes necesssary if you can't afford another tank.
the parents will sometimes eat their babies as well. be sure to have plenty of plants as hiding places- real or fake.

you could put all the females together into one tank. males into another. if you keep them all together, you should have many females to one male. that is not what you want because you don't want many babies, but otherwise the female would be harassed continuously.

female livebearers can store viable sperm for months - isolating a female will not necessarily keep her from having babies

oops, i forgot about that part. thanks for the corrrection!

mollies are livebearers

im having the same prob wth guppies. and my lttl bros decided to drop a large rock in the bottom of my spare tank, so i cnt just seperate them.....i can live with strainging out males for 6 months...if i had the tank...o well, im rambling....

stores recomend 1 on inch fish for every gallon though i think for forty gallons you can definatly keep up to 45-50 of those fish. when the tank gets overpopulated the fish may start dieing off. i had about 40 fish in a twenty gallon tank and upon going away for app. 4 days i lost all but two of the guppies and 4 platties and two danios. if they start dieng off i would reccomend to change from 25 - 50 % of the water and hope for the best. i bred these fish to feed my catfish once in a while so i somewhat controled the population that way.and a freind of mine resorted to not feeding them and that method was far more succseful than mine