Guppys

smudge_

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I bought three guppys today in pets at home, I took pity on them more than anything else as they looked so miserable :sad: they all have red patches behind their gills is this normal or are they sick?
 
They might irritated gills if they have been kept in poor quality water. Keep their water really clean and do lots of water changes, you should see an improvement soon. Give it a week or so.
 
PLEASE do not turn this into a thread about the condition of fish at this chain store. Stick to the point about the condition of the guppys :good:
 
Ive never had much luck in keeping guppies despite a mature tank and good water stats. Seems that the breed has been weakened too much by over breeding.
 
Its not a lie, guppies are disgustingly over bred and most likely incredibly inbred.

Sorry but if anyone knows anything about breeding for specific colours then they know this will be true. If you breed a beautiful male pure yellow guppy to a averagely nice female, you keep back the best quality pure yellow female babies to put back to the same male (their father) to produce more intense yellow babies.

Same with Black Mollies etc or any recessive colour, to keep/improve the colour, it will involve breeding back at some point and with the rapid breeding livebearers, it will happen far too regularly. Especially bred in huge vats and ponds, nothing to control who or what is breeding with whom.

That aside... bright red gills generally means one of two things, less likely... gill flukes/parasites... or more likely... ammonia poisoning.

Actually.. thirdly... seeing as lots of fish are so weird looking these days, they might have transparent gill plates or have a genetic defmormity meaning they dont have gill plates!
 
Its not a lie, guppies are disgustingly over bred and most likely incredibly inbred.

Sorry but if anyone knows anything about breeding for specific colours then they know this will be true. If you breed a beautiful male pure yellow guppy to a averagely nice female, you keep back the best quality pure yellow female babies to put back to the same male (their father) to produce more intense yellow babies.

Same with Black Mollies etc or any recessive colour, to keep/improve the colour, it will involve breeding back at some point and with the rapid breeding livebearers, it will happen far too regularly. Especially bred in huge vats and ponds, nothing to control who or what is breeding with whom.

That aside... bright red gills generally means one of two things, less likely... gill flukes/parasites... or more likely... ammonia poisoning.

Actually.. thirdly... seeing as lots of fish are so weird looking these days, they might have transparent gill plates or have a genetic defmormity meaning they dont have gill plates!

I bought them because they looked so sad and I felt sorry for them, but if that is the problem could it spread to my other fish? thats a worry!
 
24 hours later and they seem to be looking much healthier, only one has the red marks now. I have also noticed that the one I thought was a bit fat seems to be pregnant, oops... :blink:
 
well 2 of the three are now dead :no: both died at different times and in the space of a few hours both went from seeming perfectly healthy to simply giving up, the gills on each were very badly inflamed, the second one lasted a week longer than the first. The third one seems fine, but so did the others. Bit saddened by this but at least I gave them a chance, they were sick before I got them but at least they got a nice home for a little while, dont think I will be getting more fish from that shop though.

The second one was about to give birth when she died which is particularly sad.
 

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