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skinny/emaciated guppies?


Squidlet

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Hey guys

I seem to have a problem with my guppies where I notice they get skinny over a period of time then die. At first I thought it was due to old age and perhaps poor immune system but its been happening to my young guppies as well :-?

For example tonight I euthanised one(always seems to be females as well?), which was skinny and emanciated and she was only about 8 months old I think. Im trying to think how long it took but for the life of me I can't remember when I last saw her. It was kinda like "feeding time...oh...you have issues".

They are getting it one at a time, and it dosn't seem to be effecting my other fish but I have seen something very similar happening to other live bearers such as platys and swordtails. My friend who breeds guppies has this issue with hers sometimes, and has had it with a couple of swordtails also. Could this be worms? The fish are still eating fine and swimming around.

Ive been trying to research and have come across fish tuberculosis and now am very worried that I may have this in my tank :( I have bristlenoses, silver shark, mollies, swordtails and pygmy cats which so far are unaffected. This has been happening with my guppies for a while, since before september last year. Then I'll go a few months with everything looking fine and then a guppy will get skinny again. Any ideas? I havnt noticed any other symptoms apart from occasionaly white poop?

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Not too long ago there was a major problem with guppies dying due to some sort of infection. I think they even stopped importing them for a while as the problem wasn't just in NZ. Whatever it was it seemed to affect these fish and not others. Not sure if there was a cure for it either :dunno:

Anyone else remember?

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As terrible as this sounds, I am glad to hear I'm not the only one with this problem :dunno:

If it was TB, would it be affecting all the fish and not just the guppies?

Once I did have a female who developed a bent spine but it was over a couple of months and she had had many fry over her life, so I assumed it was due to old age and carrying so many babies. Kinda like a poor hunchbacked old woman?

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Just a thought.....what's the male/female ratio in your tank. There should be more females than males so that no one female is being hassled to mate too much. If you have more males than females maybe the girls are being given no respite, get tired and run down.

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It is true that stressed fish will be more susceptable to disease and that the females will be more stressed but piscene TB is normally picked up at quarantine and is not common. It also tends to go through a whole bunch of fish and is not that selective. I would not think the problem is TB. There is good reason why guppies are one of the fish that Maf wish to keep a closer look on under the new Quarantine requirements. They are susceptable to a number of serious diseases.

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I still have the same problem and have tried several meds. One other symptom of mine is that they flash soon after feeding and again it is only the females. I have tried different foods without success. :dunno:

I had the same problem for years and in the end lost all of my guppies to it, and wont touch them again.. I can only loosly suggest or trace it to some sort of guppy virus that has been hinted at a few times around the place, it appears that some fish carry it and are immune to it, and when you mix stock or introduce more guppies you introduce the virus and it wipes them all out. I tried all sorts of meds and foods when it was affecting my fish and had no luck as well.

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Just a thought.....what's the male/female ratio in your tank. There should be more females than males so that no one female is being hassled to mate too much. If you have more males than females maybe the girls are being given no respite, get tired and run down.

I have always had roughly 3-4:1 ratio. At the moment I only have two males and about 8 females, I havn't noticed too much hassling going on. I have been thinking about getting rid of my guppies for a while now and just focusing on mollies(which would also mean my tanks are less stocked = better water conditions?). Perhaps whatever this is is in my lines, now would be a good time to quit before is potentially gets worse.

It is true that stressed fish will be more susceptable to disease and that the females will be more stressed but piscene TB is normally picked up at quarantine and is not common. It also tends to go through a whole bunch of fish and is not that selective. I would not think the problem is TB. There is good reason why guppies are one of the fish that Maf wish to keep a closer look on under the new Quarantine requirements. They are susceptable to a number of serious diseases.

This is what I was hoping to hear I am going to admit :) Im trying to be super careful as I had pneumonia last christmas and now with my lungs being not as strong as they were tuberculosis would just be the icing on the cake :o. I guess you should always be careful no matter what, even if you don't suspect disease in your tank. I'll do some water changes on both my tanks, and maybe look at lowering my stocking density to help improve the water quality.

UV filter would be a great idea actually, but unfortunatly this has been happening to the guppies in my smaller 40l tank, and the only uv filters I have seen are quite big?

Thank you for your advice guys, im going to have to re-think what to do about this wee problem. Also just out of curiosity, has anyone ever had tuberculosis in their tank?

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I had it in goldfish I imported many years ago. There are a number of cases of piscene TB in humans but I think from quarantine facilities. This is the main reason for the requirement to wear long gloves when working with fish in Quarantine. As far as I am aware it is virtually incurable and the fish are destroyed rather than treated.

Emaciation and bent spines are not uncommon signs of disease or genetic problems in fish.

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We have the same thing going on in our daughters female guppy tank. It started with the odd one every couple of weeks but in the last 2 weeks it's been 1-4 a day.

There are a few platy in there- only two of them have died and last wk one of the gba died.

The larger females were the first to go. Now the babies are dying too. But it seems not the young males. I had been transfering the male babies into the male guppy tank up until they started dying. The male guppy tank is fine so far but I won't be surprised if they start dying too.

I was wondering if I should euth the whole tank to prevent it spreading to any of my other tanks

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This is oh so common nowadays

I remember introducing an imported guppy 3 or 4 years back

which bought something in with it and i started getting the wasting thing going on with my guppies

I eventually culled the whole lot and started again

Now I am very careful about what I introduce into my tanks

I still get the odd skinny one and bent spine but I always cull these out

Best to only keep the strong and eliminate the weak

I tend to think its some form of bacteria which is causing all the problems

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Hi,

Have you tried levamisole?

I've had this happen to a few of my platies & baby mollies in one of my tanks and it turned out to be worms as they got better after being treated with this. HTH!

I can't guarantee that my guppies had the same thing but I tried, levamisole, metro, prazi, doxycycline, salt, tonic, meth blue, albendazole and a few other things with no change in symptoms in mine. Obviously tried different drugs at different times on different bathes of affected fish :)

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