| Subject: |
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mortalities in the boy tank |
| Name: |
|
jc |
| Date Posted: |
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Jul 31, 03 - 6:01 AM |
| Email: |
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jcrei1122@aol.com |
| State |
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ca |
| Message: |
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I finally have all my fish in more spacious tanks. The boys are all in a 30 gallon tank that came brand new from the store,many moons ago, but it took me a while to get it ready. It has a "biowheel" filter. All my guppies had a biowheel filter when they were together in the little 10 gallon tank, and I cleaned it a bit and gave it back to one of my tanks of girls today. The larger and presumably more powerful filter for the boys tank might be part of the problem, but I never had any filter problems before this week, and the boys have been in the same tank with the same filter for more thatn 2 weeks now.
I was admiring my beautiful boys one day, when I noticed that Tiger, my only full Endler's Livebearer, was falling to the bottom and acting sick. I've had him longer than all but 2 of my guppies, and I really have no idea how old he was when I got him, so I thought, he might just be getting old. Then I noticed that one of the youngsters just barely mature enough to sell was dpwn on the bottom making feeble attempts to fend off the half dozen or so other boys who were picking on him. I ran upstairs and started rinsing my breeder boxes so I could isolate fishes for closer observation. When I got back I didn't see any young adult fish being picked on right away, but by the time I got Tiger in a box, I saw that the other fish still had problems too. Then while I worked with them, I thought I saw a little fish get sucked right into the filter uptake tube. It happened really fast and for a while I wasn't sure it was really what it looked like. ( Bits of leaves often resemble tiny fish if they move fast.) Anyway, I imediately started disasembling my filter so if there was a fish in there it wouldn't be stuck. Pretty soon I saw a small greyish fish swirling up and down near the filter and caught him and put him in with Tiger. I had noticed earlier that this particular baby had a rather sad looking pointed tail that looked more damaged thatn genetic. (About half of my boys have ragged uneven tails naturally.) Within about and hour Tiger and the baby were belly up and a couple more hours later the bigger guy was also belly up, so I removed them and did a little cleaning in case ther was some leftover food or something rotting in there. I was still thinking the baby was young enough he could have been born defective and Tiger really might have been old, but I wasn't sure what was up with the other guy. My mom had a theory that the filter might have dammaged the sick fishes by sucking too hard when they got too close, so she was watching closely a couple of days later and commenting about how a little fish seemed to be able to swim quite close to the filter and get away and come back again with no apparent problems. I came and looked from another angle and asked for clarification about what the fish looked like and where it was because the one I saw closest to the filter didn't look so good. She couldn't see it from where she was until I pointed it out, but there was a dead fish stuck between the little verticle slats of the filter tube with just his head poking out. We took care of that guy and I did some more cleaning and called a local pet store for advise. Now I have a pice of fine net type stuff auround the end of that tube, but I still think the filter was not the only problem because there are tinier fishes in there who are still acting just fine, including the tiniest one , who I call "Jarjar" because he spent almost a week alone in a tiny jar while I was camping. Then tonight I noticed that Bright's tail looks almost like it's unraveling. He has one of those ragged looking tails anyway, but now there's this tiny threadlike thing trailing behind the very top corner of his caudal fin, which happens to be the shorter side. There might be 2 threads. It almost looks like he just swam up to the surface and caught a floating piece of spider web, not that there were any spiders or webs in there, but there's always dust and my cats have some pretty fine hair. I think I'll sleep on it and maybe go ahead and treat with tetracycline or my green "fungus cure" in the morning if I still think there might be an infection going around. Some of their new plants do have some suspicious fuzzy spots and the snails are going to outnumber the guppies soon if I don't get rid of some. I want to know that my boys and all my fish are healthy soon partly because I think I'm almost ready to sell some and partly because I just don't want to have to worry about them all getting sick and stuff. |
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