Please Help! My Platy appears to be dying!!

Priceless quote	subscribe [rss]	subscribe [email]	#1	Posted 04 Jul 2008, 5:00 pm
I've got a female Platy that is just hanging around on the bottom of the tank. She didn't come up to eat and doesn't really move unless bothered. She looks completely normal...no fungus or tail rot that I can recognize(although I'm brand new to this). However, I had 2 fish, a guppy and a Platy) die a couple days ago and I'm now panicked!! They were in 2 seperate tanks but I found them dead the same day. I looked them over and couldn't really see anything visable wrong w/ them so I flushed them. Although it did kinda like like my Platy was missing one of his side fins (or whatever those are called by his gills). I'm not really surprised if some sort of fungus spread from one tank to another since I occassionally throw a female into the male tank to keep the males aggression down. Now w/ more babies then I know what to do with I've been trying to seperate them by sex once I can tell which are which. Needless to say, there's alot of tank swapping. Bottom line? I've overloaded big time and don't know what to do about it. I have tooo many fish in both of my 10 gallons and the adult females are all pregnant w/ more. My water looks cloudy but I fight w/ that often but I think I just have too many fish. I have a filteration systems, heaters and do weekly 30-40% water changes. But they keep popping out babies and I can never get rid of them. Now I'm scared to get rid of them cuz I don't want to pass on anything that may be going on in my tanks. What should I do? Thanks for any help in advance. Sponsored links
meliss_cole quote			#2	Posted 05 Jul 2008, 11:05 am
The bad news for your fish is you can't stop them from reproducing. The interesting thing about livebearers is that females can store sperm in their bodies after having only mated once and they can can give birth multiple times before ever having to mate again. Exactly how many fish do you have in each tank? 10 gallons is not very big, you may need to upgrade to a larger aquarium if you want to keep all of your fish. Over crowded tanks are never a good thing. If you don't already have a master test kit to test your water levels you should get one. They can be about $20 but they're worth it and you can use them over and over. Test your pH, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate levels. The proper pH for platys and guppies is between neutral to slightly acidic or 7.0-8.0. There should be no ammonia or nitrites in the water becuase they are highly toxic to your fish, and the nitrate levels should be below 45 ppm (parts per million). The thing about having an over crowded tank is that the fish that live in it are also living in their own waste. The more fish you have the more concentrated the waste in the water becomes. You are deffinately doing the right thing by doing partial water changes often but you might need extra filtration in order to keep the aquariums clean enough. Either add a second filter system or upgrade the system to cycle a larger capacity of water at a quicker rate. This could help your water quality immensely. I hope this answers your questions but if it doesn't maybe we can explore other options. Let us know.
mickey quote			#3	Posted 08 Jul 2008, 12:05 am
priority one is reducing the stock in your tanks.The filtration obviously cant handle the stocking level. swapping fish from one tank to another is a complete recipe for disaster. until you have the tank capacity for all of the reproduction that is going on I would suggest you seperate your males and females for now. 10 gallons is fine for a breeding tank if you have a much larger tank for growing on the fry.for every breeding pair of fish that you have you need at least 3 tanks.One for the parent and 2 for the fry can you not ask any local pet stores if they will take some of your stock off your hands until you are sorted. http://www.fishtankforum.co.uk