how to tell when my ballon molly is ready to give birth?

[kerahbearh]

my room mate bought a male and female balloon molly and received 3 babies free without doing research about them. now the female is pregnat and we were wondering how long it takes before the give birth?

 

[Newman]

It takes around 4 weeks for this thing to give birth from the time of mating. It hard to tell for these just by looking at their belly size, as they are naturally bloated. look for how dark the gravid spot is. the darker, the sooner you should expect.

You actually recieved more than 3 (more like 40+) but the rest either died, got eaten, or you havent found them yet.

 

[drake53]

from my experience all the mollies i have bred always stopped eating about a day before they dropped their babies. (with my first brood i got a mixture of lyre tails, dalmatians, sailfins, and at least 2 pointed mouth mollies(poecilia sphenops, black and bloated molly are poecilia hybrid))

 

[beckyd]

I have found balloon bellies to be very difficult to predict. Some I cannot see their gravid spot, even though they are light colors. I can only tell when they had fry because the gravid spot disappears, or the babies are colored like them. They are just too round to tell.
It will take about a month from mating, but you have no way of knowing when that was or when she will drop. Just keep alot of plants and watch for fry. My mollies don't stop eating...ever. I actually watched one eating one evening, swim down to the corner, drop a baby, and race back to the top before the food was gone. Of course that ruined my whole evening from getting anything accomplished because I was then stuck to the tank waiting for each one to pop out. I just never get tired of seeing that. And that's the only time I've ever caught one of my mollies in the act. Mine always have their babies at night.