# Different Types of Molly Fry



## maykaym4 (Dec 2, 2008)

How soon can I tell what kind of tail my molly fry will have? I have a couple lyretail males, who I assume should be the fathers... but all the babies have normal looking tails. They are probably about 3/4" long right now, should I be able to tell already?

Also, I have a sailfin male in there too (when I bought him, the store made a mistake because he was in the wrong tank and he was the same size as the others back then, but he ended up being, well... huge). Can he breed with my normal female mollies, or does sailfin molly + molly = mutant baby mollies?...Or is a molly, a molly, a molly?

Hopefully these questions aren't too stupid. 

Thanks!


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## StripesAndFins (Dec 31, 2008)

a molly is a molly is a molly. They have different colors or tails but they are probably the same species


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## elvis332 (Dec 29, 2007)

yep i think stripesandfins is right


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## COM (Mar 15, 2008)

Mollies will breed with other types of mollies and sometimes with other similar livebearers. The phenotype of the offspring is somewhat hard to predict.


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## OldMan (Dec 30, 2008)

Mollies are not mollies. They are velifera or latipinna which are both called sailfins or shenops. Many of the mollies we see every day are crosses between these fish. The typical black molly with the short fins is usually mostly a shenops. There are also at least 18 other fish from the genus Poecilia that go by the common name of molly. These other fish are not common in the hobby so we can usually ignore them outside of specialized livebearer forums. The really huge sailfin sounds like a velifera to me. They can get up to a huge 6 inches long. Your sailfin may have bred with the black lyretails but he also may not have. I would not expect to see the lyretail look on a fish less than about 1 1/2 inches long but there may be a hint of it before that.


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## Nagy07 (Jan 11, 2009)

i was wondering that also, i bought a black lyretail female and a dolmation male hoping to get a mix between the two


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