ba-dabing

Hi,
I just purchased my next set of fish that I am going to add to my 20 gallon tank after quarantine. They are 5 Green Cobra guppies and 3 "Misc" (black body, red fins) guppies. All male.

I'm new to the Guppy world so I have 2 questions so far:

1. What kind of guppies are the black and red ones? The tank they were in just said "Misc" guppies.

2. The Green Cobra guppies seem to be doing fine but these 3 black and red guppies seem to like to hang out at the surface a lot.

My tank parameters are in my info. Any help appreciated.

ba-dabing

One of the black and red guppies died

The other 2 are still swimming at the top of the tank. Although I have noticed that one of them occassionaly swims around the rest of the tank now.

Evelyn1919

maybe you added too many fish in at once and that's why your fish died?
i'm pretty new to this but i heard that you should only put a few fish in at once.
did you check for ammonia and all that stuff? maybe the ammonia went up way to high and that's why your guppy died.

sorry i can't be much help but let's see what else other people have to say about this.

good luck!!!

ba-dabing

Hi Evelyn,

Thank you for the suggestion -- I did a reading last night and the ammonia is at 0, nitrite is 0, and nitrate is 15ppm.

Even though it's a 10 gallon tank and there are (were) 8 fish in it, I was only going to keep them in there for about a week. And before I had the 8 fish in there the tank was my old fish tank and it had about 15 fish at any given time. That's why I am switching to a 20 gallon. (The 20 gallon currently has 3 platy in it now, I gave back all the other fish to the local fish store)

Faye Rod

From your aquarium info it looks like you are cycled and have good water parameters in the tank. I also had trouble adding guppies recently - two of the four died. I acclimated them to my different pH from the LFS but wonder if that was the problem since my pH is 8.2 Yours is 7.9 so it might also be what affected your guppies.

The acclimation process and adding fish has been a challenge for me - I've started to add Stress Coat when adding fish and keeping the lights off and not feeding for a few hours. The last two fish I lost - a dwarf gourami and a platy seemed to have internal parasites they brought here from the LFS so I'm treating for that now.

Guppies tend to stay near the top - the four I have now are inseparable and swim in circles and explore things together. So maybe your remaining fish will be ok.

angelfish220

What kind of test are you using? around here the best thing we agree on is the API test kit, the liquid kind. they are the most accurate, the test strips can give you bad readings. I would suggest getting your nitrates down, I like to keep mine 5ish but I like to worry alot though so it might just be me.

ba-dabing

Hi Angel,

I use the API Liquid test kit.

Unfortunately my tap water Nitrates is 10ppm so getting Nitrates any lower would be a challenge.

ba-dabing

Hi Faye,

Yeah... I'm begining to think it's these 3 (now 2) fish. The 5 Green Cobra guppies are more vibrant in color than when we got them and they swim and explore the tank.

I called the LFS to ask what their return policy is and they will take back any dead fish but with gas prices these days I'm wondering if it's worth it.

ba-dabing

I don't know what happened but the remaining two "sick" guppies are fine today !

They are swimming around with the other guppies and eating and their color is much better. Weird!