Male guppy sick?

Obleus

About a week ago i bought 6(4 female, 2 male) guppies and added them to a tank that was running with stabiliser for 2 days. Today i noticed that one of the male guppies(who was active before) is now just lying at the bottom and when i feed the other guppies, which are doing great, he just ignores the food. Anyone know whats wrong?

TallTree01

Do you have a test kit? Test the ammonia and nitrite.
Irregardless of the stabiliser you added, your tank is uncycled. This means your filter can't remove the fishes waste efficiently and the water is dirty with ammonia and nitrite ( poisonous to fish ) . It is unlikely that your filter is even a bit filtered so it is unlikely that anything is present except ammonia.
Do some immediate water changes to get the ammonia levels down. You want that to be sitting at 0.
You will need to continue your many waterchanges for about 3-4 weeks. That is about how long it takes to establish a working filter.
Do not add anymore fish and do not over feed. The more you feed the more your fish crap which creates more ammonia and could kill them.
Your male guppy and the rest of your guppies will probably die unless you keep ammonia levels down.

Frayk

Stabiliser is just an aid, it helps with cycling, it cant and wont cycle your tank. A tank needs to be up and running for at least 5 weeks +, regular checks of water parameters, before adding fish, good luck cheers. :-@

Bob

Hi Obleus,

Based on the information provided aim not willing to suggest what the problem "probably" is.

As mentioned by TT and Frayk you may have a build up of ammonia which is causing problems but this would usually have the same impact on all the fish. Some idea of the tank volume would allow a "guesstimate" in regards to ammonia concentrations.

If you have a contagious disease this will likely spread to the other fish again with fairly terminal results.

Have a look at the following link and compare the disease descriptors with what is evident in regards to the fish that is unwell as a means of coming to possible options. You could also seek advice from the store you bought them from or seek out a specialist guppy forum.

http://guppyz.tripod.com/guppy_disease_chart.html

Cheers and good luck,

Bob

Mooo

Ideally a tank should be run for at the very least 4 weeks before adding new stock and then only add the stock a few at a time
You can usually add a few small fish after the second or third week. if using a bio starter
Fish will certainly weaken, often fatally, in a toxic new tank

Errol Wilson

I sympathise, but as stated above time is the thing in waiting for a tank to cycle. But even then water chemistry is very important I recently lost a few fish because I changed too much water when doing a water change, lowered the PH too mucch, causing a crase in PH killig my fish, I feel like D...k. So allways keep an eye on your water it's the most important thing in keeping fishies and buy a good test kit and use it!

Good luck

Doug

The other thing with Guppies is that they are generally horribly inbred and this leads to all sorts of complications. When I worked at the fish shop we would quarantine the guppies for 2 or 3 times as long because they often were weak, diseased and had the ability to kill off entire rows of fish.

Not uncommon to loose an entire batch in quarantine