#but im not sure if thats like. a sign that my dose isnt high enough or just part of having a job

[vaguelydefinedshapes]

yayy increasing my dose seems to be helping!

[swish-the-fish]

So I didn’t want to post about this until the situation was resolved, but this is all that’s left of my colony of purple Moscow guppies

Out of eight adults and sixteen fry, these two fry are the only ones that survived.

This is kind of a long story, but here we go.

For anyone that may have been following me and my misadventures with guppies, you might remember that around the beginning of August I had a bunch of random store bought guppies, Momma, Annie, JB, an unnamed male, and a bunch of fry who I just kinda... stopped talking about. So what happened was I decided to redo their tank because they had painted gravel, and I wanted to switch to something more natural that wouldn’t flake off and hurt them if they ingested the paint. So I went to the store and bought a bag of fancy planting soil that was advertised as volcanic rock with starter cultures of beneficial bacteria.

Being my paranoid self, I didn’t really trust that, so I washed the devil out of it. I probably spent an hour washing the entire 20lbs bag. In order to not crash the cycle, I put a bunch of the new substrate (probably about half of it) in a Tupperware container and put it in the tank to start cycling. Fast forward a week, I take out all the old gravel and put the new stuff in place. I monitor the cycle just to make sure it didn’t crash, but besides a small spike in ammonia (it got up to .5ppm if I’m remembing right) everything was fine.

But then, one by one, all the guppies stopped eating. They stopped swimming around, they would just hover at the surface or at the bottom of the tank. I did my frantic research, and all the symptoms pointed to parasites. ‘No problem’ I thought, and I marched myself to the local fish store and bought a bottle and test kit for cupermine. Only the unnamed male has died at this point, and the fry had been moved to grow up tanks before the adult began to show symptoms, and none of them ever died so I don’t think they ever got infected. Over the course of treatment, the two females Momma and Annie die, but JB recovers! He starts eating again and he regains his energy. He gets moved to the fry tank as they’re now old enough that he isn’t a threat. I believe that means the treatment has run its course, so after some water changed I leave the tank up and running and put Pepper in there so she can enjoy the extra room. This is my big mistake, and I can only be glad that either she managed to avoid infection or the parasite was species specific to guppies.

Not having the 20g at this point, I give JB and the fry (now about 2.5 months old) to the lfs and move to Wilmington for college.

Flash forward to September and Hurricane Florence. The week before the hurricane hits I found out my friend from high school had committed suicide. Being so busy with classes I hadn’t checked the news and went straight home so I could attend his memorial service without knowing about the hurricane (and therefore leaving my fish behind). I was out of school for almost a month, and it was during this period that I got Diego, Artemis, and the new colony of guppies. I had taken in Artemis (a rescue) and bought Diego assuming that the bettas wouldn’t survive a month trapped in my dorm without any care, and my RA has agreed to let me have the 20g in the suite common room so I bought a group of 8 adolescent guppies from a lovely woman named Jen. Being the largest tank I had set up, they went in the 10g old guppy tank. This was big mistake number two.

So eventually I go back to Wilmington, get the 20g set up and everything is going great. The guppies are growing quickly, and there one female that just balloons in size. I mean she’s twice the size of the other females, and she the first to get pregnant. I assumed that she was just older, possibly from a different brood, and just went about things as normal. Fast forward again to the middle of December. I find the second largest female, pregnant at the time, dead. This throws me, and I check all the parameters, everything’s fine. I chalk it up to complications with birth and move on. The next week I go home for winter break, all my fish in tow. A few days later, the big female is about to give birth a second time. I see a long, translucent white stand coming out of her anus. Confused, I google it to see if its a sign of labor. Surprise surprise it isn’t. White translucent poop means internal parasites, I go to grab the cupermine only to find out that Cupermine only treats external parasites, not internal ones. I do more research, find the proper meds and dose the tank. Meanwhile the guppies are dropping like flies. The first to go was the third largest female who actually did die giving birth, I found about three fry swimming that day along with the dead female. The rest of them die one by one, and even after dosing the tank, many of them just didn’t make it. I’m left with one male and one female fry who I’m fairly certain will survive.

I didn’t want to post about this while it was happening because I didn’t know what was going on in the beginning and by the time I figured it out I felt like complete and utter shit. I failed them as their care giver, and I feel so guilt that I didn’t recognize what was happening soon and step in to correct it.

I still have hope though, in the form of Jen and the absolutely amazing @titans-guppies-aquatics. I got back in contact with Jen who had actually had her colonies go through a crash at the same time, and got my hands of a pair of pregnant females and a cross breed (bluexpurple) Moscow male. I also got a trio of blue deltas from Titan, and I’m hoping to breed the two together to get the beautiful full body color of the moscows with that stunning delta tail.

This is been a really rough start to my guppy breeding, but I’m hopeful that things will get better and that we can recover :)

Tl:dr I’m an idiot, parasites are so hard to get rid of and @titans-guppies-aquatics saved my butt