Post by MartinOsirusPost by Tom MasonMy mollies seems to always be looking around for food, if they can get away
from the rampant male for 5 seconds.... is this normal?
Yes its normal
Post by Tom Masonshould I feed them
until they stop looking for food
No - that would kill them from overfeeding.
Lowering the temperature will decrease their metabolism, which slows the
rate at which they burn through the food you feed them. I'm not
suggesting you lower the temperature, but check to see if you are running
a bit high. Smaller fish don't have a large storage capacity, so they
tend to be in a constant grazing mode. Mollies are quite herbivorous, so
they can spend a lot of time grazing bits of algae. You can feed them
several times a day, in small portions. It's actually better to feed
them their daily allotment divided up into 3 or 4 portions. If your
filtering and water change routine is up to it, you can feed them even
more often, but it's not really necessary unless you were seriously
conditioning them for spawning (and to get them to breed doesn't really
take anything special).
In general, feeding with poor quality foods might give different results
than when using higher quality foods. They burn through the cheap stuff
faster and go into grazing mode sooner, (but with many fish, the
difference might be hard to notice ;~). If you want to test this theory
(and Mollies are voracious eaters), feed them some insect larvae (white
or red frozen bloodworms from your LFS) and see if there post-meal
behaviour is any different. The insect larvae would resemble some of
their natural food. Be sure to keep a level of salt in their water (they
are from river outlets to oceans, so a degree of salt is considered to be
essential to their long good health). hth
NetMax