Hi, I have just joined your group, seems like folks here know their stuff.
I'm going to start from the beginning and sorry if its all a bit long but I am not sure which bits might be important.
The Boyfriend and I started a little tiny aquarium about 6 months ago, we put in 5 male guppies and a glass shrimp. the plants from the shop came with snails so we got a clown loach... and another one... all in a 21 litre tank! I know, terrible rookie stuff. However I did twice weekly water changes and the water was coming back testing as fine.
We got a bit of fighting between the 5 males and one wound up hiding all the time in a certain spot and getting his tail sprit almost right down to the butt! poor little guy! So we decided to step it up a level... and bought a 4 foot tank, we set it up for 5 weeks to cycle etc, made sure it all tested perfect (we have been bringing samples to the LFS, to ensure it really was fine) Then we moved the boys into he big tank and the fighting stopped.
All seemed well in Utopia and as we were planning on going on holidays home mid august for 4 weeks we decided not to change anything... except then the BF went to the LFS on his own and came home beaming with a bag of lady Guppies. Ten! to be precise. So we did the usual process of sitting the bag in the water, adding a little water and then popped all the girls in.
It wasn't long until we had the first casualties, no sickness visible early on and no marks on the dead, one male one female. Then another and another but they started to show, what turned out to be Columnaris.
We treated with chloromycetin given to us by the pet shop from their private stash... except we had no idea what it was... as we researched more we realised it must have been a gram negative antibiotic and of course the single dose they had advised wouldn't work. We went back to the LFS and found out the name of the medication and got another smaller dose and were told it was not necessary to repeat treat? We had 3 days of no deaths and BF went back to the shop and bought 5 more!!!!! 2 males, 3 females to replace some of the lost ones. The LFS know us quite well now So I kind of wished they had used their noggins and told us to wait. I had found another furry mouth when the BF arrived home with another bag of (lets be fair, stunning guppies) but then we had to put the 5 new guppies in the 21 litre tank with the poor loaches who were waiting for rehoming.
2 were dead by morning and one very sick... we euthanised her... so then we wound up with one male and one heavily pregnant female in the little tank and the rest in the other.
After messy days of discoveries of how great aquarium salt is and we have now bought some trisulfa so we could try to treat regularly, we have completed a 3rd treatment (all after water changes)
mostly everybody is kind of sorted... I think, but I have some questions
1) can a guppy get better after columnaris? or does it just not happen? Because we woulnd up buying a 3rd hospital tank to put those who were sick in, with higher salt etc. one with a lump missing from her lip has been absolutely fine for days now, about 5 days, So we have popped her back in with the big group in big tank because the male female ratio is rubbish and we were trying to help out... was this ok? She still has a bit of a wonky looking lip but she's eating, strong and no "fluffiness" at the mouth.
2) another male yesterday looked a bit "off" and had a white thing sticking out of his tummy and curling round, his tail had streamers and I just thought he seemed a bit odd so I popped him across to the hospital tank, now he's mostly sitting on the heater sucker plug. He seems to have developed similar to the next female in question and Im not sure what it is, secondary infection maybe? Streamers and white things both gone after netting and transfer.
3) One of the females from the big tank started hanging around alone, etc so I put her in hospital tank expecting her to die... she didn't... she still hasn't! its been 7 days and she's still going! not sure what she's eating, have been feeding the other female who I transferred back to big tank today... but she hasn't shown any interest, tried with peas and sweetcorn, even a smidgen of garlic too! apparently its great for fishy immune systems? So she just sits on things, even the other female has been helping her to get out and swim around, literally swimming under her at times to lift her up.
However she doesn't seem to be getting much better, two days ago she came out with the others to greet me in the morning but didn't eat... And the male that I put in there seems to have developed the same sitting on heater plug behaviour and well I am just stumped to be honest.
Is this a sign of permanent illness/weakness that they wont get better from? I am relatively new to fish keeping but now much better read than I was to start with. But I am exhausted after weeks of reading and trying to figure it all out and LFS are fed up of me asking for advice, when they realised we knew the columnaris was from them they didn't really want to help and tried to sell us a different type of fish.
We fly out in 6 days and I would appreciate any advice as our house mate will be feeding and a friend will be doing changes but I don't know how much they will notice/do so I am trying to get everything to the point of just needing maintenance not big intervention.
If you got this far, thank you so so much for reading and any advice you can give
I'm going to start from the beginning and sorry if its all a bit long but I am not sure which bits might be important.
The Boyfriend and I started a little tiny aquarium about 6 months ago, we put in 5 male guppies and a glass shrimp. the plants from the shop came with snails so we got a clown loach... and another one... all in a 21 litre tank! I know, terrible rookie stuff. However I did twice weekly water changes and the water was coming back testing as fine.
We got a bit of fighting between the 5 males and one wound up hiding all the time in a certain spot and getting his tail sprit almost right down to the butt! poor little guy! So we decided to step it up a level... and bought a 4 foot tank, we set it up for 5 weeks to cycle etc, made sure it all tested perfect (we have been bringing samples to the LFS, to ensure it really was fine) Then we moved the boys into he big tank and the fighting stopped.
All seemed well in Utopia and as we were planning on going on holidays home mid august for 4 weeks we decided not to change anything... except then the BF went to the LFS on his own and came home beaming with a bag of lady Guppies. Ten! to be precise. So we did the usual process of sitting the bag in the water, adding a little water and then popped all the girls in.
It wasn't long until we had the first casualties, no sickness visible early on and no marks on the dead, one male one female. Then another and another but they started to show, what turned out to be Columnaris.
We treated with chloromycetin given to us by the pet shop from their private stash... except we had no idea what it was... as we researched more we realised it must have been a gram negative antibiotic and of course the single dose they had advised wouldn't work. We went back to the LFS and found out the name of the medication and got another smaller dose and were told it was not necessary to repeat treat? We had 3 days of no deaths and BF went back to the shop and bought 5 more!!!!! 2 males, 3 females to replace some of the lost ones. The LFS know us quite well now So I kind of wished they had used their noggins and told us to wait. I had found another furry mouth when the BF arrived home with another bag of (lets be fair, stunning guppies) but then we had to put the 5 new guppies in the 21 litre tank with the poor loaches who were waiting for rehoming.
2 were dead by morning and one very sick... we euthanised her... so then we wound up with one male and one heavily pregnant female in the little tank and the rest in the other.
After messy days of discoveries of how great aquarium salt is and we have now bought some trisulfa so we could try to treat regularly, we have completed a 3rd treatment (all after water changes)
mostly everybody is kind of sorted... I think, but I have some questions
1) can a guppy get better after columnaris? or does it just not happen? Because we woulnd up buying a 3rd hospital tank to put those who were sick in, with higher salt etc. one with a lump missing from her lip has been absolutely fine for days now, about 5 days, So we have popped her back in with the big group in big tank because the male female ratio is rubbish and we were trying to help out... was this ok? She still has a bit of a wonky looking lip but she's eating, strong and no "fluffiness" at the mouth.
2) another male yesterday looked a bit "off" and had a white thing sticking out of his tummy and curling round, his tail had streamers and I just thought he seemed a bit odd so I popped him across to the hospital tank, now he's mostly sitting on the heater sucker plug. He seems to have developed similar to the next female in question and Im not sure what it is, secondary infection maybe? Streamers and white things both gone after netting and transfer.
3) One of the females from the big tank started hanging around alone, etc so I put her in hospital tank expecting her to die... she didn't... she still hasn't! its been 7 days and she's still going! not sure what she's eating, have been feeding the other female who I transferred back to big tank today... but she hasn't shown any interest, tried with peas and sweetcorn, even a smidgen of garlic too! apparently its great for fishy immune systems? So she just sits on things, even the other female has been helping her to get out and swim around, literally swimming under her at times to lift her up.
However she doesn't seem to be getting much better, two days ago she came out with the others to greet me in the morning but didn't eat... And the male that I put in there seems to have developed the same sitting on heater plug behaviour and well I am just stumped to be honest.
Is this a sign of permanent illness/weakness that they wont get better from? I am relatively new to fish keeping but now much better read than I was to start with. But I am exhausted after weeks of reading and trying to figure it all out and LFS are fed up of me asking for advice, when they realised we knew the columnaris was from them they didn't really want to help and tried to sell us a different type of fish.
We fly out in 6 days and I would appreciate any advice as our house mate will be feeding and a friend will be doing changes but I don't know how much they will notice/do so I am trying to get everything to the point of just needing maintenance not big intervention.
If you got this far, thank you so so much for reading and any advice you can give
