I have a problem and am not quite sure what to do about it. This post is kind of long, so please bear with me.
We are relatively new to aquariums, but I had one when I was growing up (when there was a lot less information available!). Our tank now is a 10 gallon tank, we check the water and do water changes frequently and everything is fine. We started out with a single guppy after the tank cycled. We then added a male Mickey Mouse platy and shortly after that the guppy died. We then added a swordtail, who died after just a few days. We added a Sunset Fire platy (female, we think, although now I'm not so sure), but the original platy seemed to chase it a lot, so we recently added two more platys (both females, we're pretty sure, although we were told by the girl at the pet store that they were both females but one doesn't have the distinct fan-shaped fin like females are supposed to). Anyway, the first platy continued to chase the Sunset Fire platy, although not as often. I didn't see them bump each other a lot, but the Sunset Fire platy would hide out inside a building we have in the tank a lot of the time for about a week and the last three or four days has gone downhill really fast. In fact, by the time I finish typing this message, I'm probably going to have to go remove it from the tank. He/She/It is just laying on its side on the bottom. Lips are still moving, but it's not doing much else.
We're having so much trouble keeping fish alive (except for the original platy, of course) that we named the last two fish Thing 1 and Thing 2 so we wouldn't get too attached.
We are wondering about moving the original platy to his own tank. He seemed perfectly content when he was by himself so we thought we might try that and see if we got more life out of the fish that we are adding. We have a 2-gallon tank available. My first question is, is that too small to move him to by himself? My second question is, if that is not too small, can I transfer about 1.5 gallons out of the existing tank and then add .5 gallons of new water and put him in there directly without going through a cycle? I'm thinking that he is the reason for the short life span of the other fish we have had. We don't want to get rid of him but we also don't want him to keep killing any new fish that we get.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
We are relatively new to aquariums, but I had one when I was growing up (when there was a lot less information available!). Our tank now is a 10 gallon tank, we check the water and do water changes frequently and everything is fine. We started out with a single guppy after the tank cycled. We then added a male Mickey Mouse platy and shortly after that the guppy died. We then added a swordtail, who died after just a few days. We added a Sunset Fire platy (female, we think, although now I'm not so sure), but the original platy seemed to chase it a lot, so we recently added two more platys (both females, we're pretty sure, although we were told by the girl at the pet store that they were both females but one doesn't have the distinct fan-shaped fin like females are supposed to). Anyway, the first platy continued to chase the Sunset Fire platy, although not as often. I didn't see them bump each other a lot, but the Sunset Fire platy would hide out inside a building we have in the tank a lot of the time for about a week and the last three or four days has gone downhill really fast. In fact, by the time I finish typing this message, I'm probably going to have to go remove it from the tank. He/She/It is just laying on its side on the bottom. Lips are still moving, but it's not doing much else.
We're having so much trouble keeping fish alive (except for the original platy, of course) that we named the last two fish Thing 1 and Thing 2 so we wouldn't get too attached.
We are wondering about moving the original platy to his own tank. He seemed perfectly content when he was by himself so we thought we might try that and see if we got more life out of the fish that we are adding. We have a 2-gallon tank available. My first question is, is that too small to move him to by himself? My second question is, if that is not too small, can I transfer about 1.5 gallons out of the existing tank and then add .5 gallons of new water and put him in there directly without going through a cycle? I'm thinking that he is the reason for the short life span of the other fish we have had. We don't want to get rid of him but we also don't want him to keep killing any new fish that we get.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
