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dropsy?


Grizzly

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Unfortunatly yes dropsy affects many fish but its like cancer. Some will get it while some won't. From what I have been told it will not affect any other fish (so no need to panic) unless the fish dies in the tank and the others eat it. But if you remove the fish before it dies then your chances are pretty high that none of the others will get it. I have also been told that thoes that have weak genetics like the albinos and some other selected strains are also more likely to suffer from high counts of dropsy.

Sorry that there is no cure and sorry about your loss. It does suck

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We are currently treating a guppy with dropsy too. :cry:

It's not true that it never has been cured - it's just rarely been cured! :roll:

Even though there is different causes for dropsy and it is not always contagious, it is definitely advisable to separate the affected fish from the others. This is a good idea anyway so that you can treat him properly. :)

This is the treatment we're using at the moment:

1. We put him in a quarantine tank (which is just a big glass container with an airstone in it). This sits on the lid so that it gets the heat of the lights (make sure you measure the temperature so that it's not too high...).

2. Get a bag of Epsom Salt from your local chemist - make sure it is not Tonic Salt. For dropsy (internal swelling, constipation, etc) you need Epsom Salt, which is pure magnesium sulfate and not sodium chloride (aka Tonic Salt). A bag cost us $5.50. The recommended dose for salt baths is 1 tsp per gallon (~4litre). We used a fraction of this because we didn't just want to dip him in the salt bath but keep him in there. So, I'd guesstimate our dose to have been a pinch for 2 litres. The Epsom Salt will help the fish deflate, ie get rid of the excess liquids caused by the kidney malfunction. With the bag of salt you purchase you will have way too much salt for treating your fishes... so fill your bath tub and bath yourself in it - it's supposed to be good for your skin etc :lol:

3.a This step is crucial if you intend to eliminate the dropsy rather than just slow it down. You have to use an antibiotic to try killing the nasties causing the internal swelling. We're using very small amounts of Furan II dissolved in the water. We're talking about a few mg per litre - so just open the pills and pour a tiny amount of the powder in the water. (Read the instructions!) It would be ideal to use other antibiotics but Furan II was the only one available in the LFS - you can ask for a few pills (if your LFS has them in bulk) and a photocopy of the instructions, rather to buy the whole pack, to save some money. Make sure you get one that treats both gram positive and gram negative bacteria (it should read that on the packaging) - ideally a so-called Broad Spectrum Antibiotic. Good ones would be (in order of preference): Spectogram, Kanacym, Tetracycline, Maracym-Two.

3.b If you're really worried about this spreading on to other fishes you can try getting some TriSulfa or Bettamax and add the recommended dose to the main tank. I would wait for now though. These two products are pretty good for preventing and controlling diseases, especially the TriSulfa but I prefer to NOT add chemicals to my tanks if there's no apparent reason to do so.

4. Do daily small water changes to the quarantine tank and make sure you keep the salt/medicine levels up (don't overdose though!). Treat the fish with antibiotics for 5 days and if you're lucky (I guess with dropsy one should say REALLY lucky!) the fish might make it. Don't forget to feed him obviously... :wink:

Should he get better, keep him in the quarantine tank for a while until you're 100% sure he is healthy again. Quarantine would indicate 40 days... Maybe someone else can suggest a reasonable time frame for this.

An alternative to helping the fish to get rid of the excess liquids is to use a syringe and suck it out. In another thread someone mentions this. I guess doing this on a small fish (like a guppy) is not advisable though.

Lastly, bear in mind that we're talking about a guppy and some might say that going through all this hustle for 1 guppy is exaggerated. IMHO a fish is a fish like any other and if I have the time/money to help him in a situation like this - I do it!

Hope this helps,

Dan

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make sure if you are treating the whole tank and have scaless fish in there you only use 1tbsp per 10 gallons

Good point sharn! Had forgotten about that... :)

So far our treatment is not being excessively effective - however, our Guppy is slightly less swollen and the visible internal bleeding (red stripes on the sides) seems to have become less. He's still bloated and the scales are still sticking out though. The odd thing is that he eats and swims around fairly normally :-? Will keep you posted :)

Grizzly: How is your Guppy doing? Any news?

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You'll never fully get rid of dropsy, once a fish has it, it will always have it you may be able to get the symptoms down for a little while but in the end it'll come back and kill the fish, so have fun trying to prolong its life, i'd just put the fish out of its misery now.

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Sorry to hear about your loss, Grizzly. :(

You'll never fully get rid of dropsy, once a fish has it, it will always have it you may be able to get the symptoms down for a little while but in the end it'll come back and kill the fish, so have fun trying to prolong its life, i'd just put the fish out of its misery now.

Are you sure about this? :( If that is the case maybe we have to euthanise our Guppy too... :cry:

And, for the record, we're not having fun trying to prolong its life - it actually involves a lot of work and us worrying about it every day... :(

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  • 2 weeks later...

Our Guppy passed away a few days ago... :(

Unluckily we seem to have another case of Dropsy on our hands now! :evil:

Once again it's a male Guppy. Just this time it's one of our younger ones. I'd like to know if it's worth trying treatment again or just euthanise him.

Also, why do we keep getting this!?! :-? We never had this before...

Tank is a 2footer stocked with a bunch of Guppies, a couple of Platies, 2 Sailfin Plecos and 3 Kuhli Loaches. The tank is very heavily planted and has good filtration/lighting.

The water parameters are fine. Temperature is at 27 C.

We do 20-25% weekly water changes and syphon the bottom every time we do this.

We feed them live food and several different dry foods.

Also, is dropsy contagious?

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated :)

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I had a danio with dropsy last year. This was the first time I had seen dropsy in over 20 years of fishkeeping. Then, helping set up a new member with danios a couple of weeks ago, he had one get dropsy too!

We both only had one fish affected but I believe it is contagious.

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As far as i know, its not contagious unless the fish dies in the tank, then it realises the liquid build up from inside of it. So if i had something that had dropsy, i'd destory it straight away to minimise the risk of anything else getting because i could be wrong as i have just taken advice from other people.

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inbreeding releases alot of genetic defects and problems, its like dogs, over the years certain ones have become prone to certain things that werent a problem a long time ago. alot of it is due to people going to one shop to buy their breeding pair out of the same batch, obviously these would be siblings as most shops dont want the hassle of buying males from one source and females from another. maybe, me love fishy, if you bought off a really well known breeder they would be less prone to dropsy? they might cost a bit more but they would be higher quality stock

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You could be right Sharn, but I have bought guppies from a variety of petshops over the years and I've just never had much luck with them, they can be beautiful fishies, but I just tend to stick to other fish I have more luck with now. It's not even that they all got dropsy, sometimes I have no idea why they have died, just got up in the morning to feed them and there is a floater in the tank, or they have gone crazy swimming around really quick and then just dropped dead, so instead of replacing them all the time which was a bit depressing and starting to get expensive, I just decided to go with something else.

Thanks for the advice though.

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  • 1 month later...

I've also had a loss due to dropsy recently.I lost one of my larger blue ram females.Like all of you..i was gutted.Nothing i could do for her.

Reading all the posts about guppy problems,it seems you kiwi's have real bad luck.Coming from South Africa,i never had any issues with my guppies.I was breeding sailfin mollies and double sword tail guppies.

Since setting up my tank mid last year,i can honestly say ,i have never had so many disease issues as i have had here.Any no, this isn't a poke at NZ.

I love NZ...just hate the sub standard fish we seem to be getting in the shops.

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dont we all mate :evil: our standard of fish really sucks but we do have some awesome people working to get us better quality fish, nz discus man imports alot of fish so we get some more bloodlines in but alot of the fish imported are from the huge farms in asia where theyre all inbred and are rife with parasites etc so we dont get the best fish possible, it really sucks but we cant do much about it unless we import top quality fish and breed from there.

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