Omg What Is Happening!

[random919]

My nan has a 64L tank and has 7 guppies, 2 black tetra and 1 neon.
we have done a water change and checked the water and the levels are fine. We haven't added any fish in the past month so there haven't been any changes to the water either.
One of the guppies who we have had for about 4 months and so is one of the older ones out of all of them. The fish has started to literally blow up into a balloon. It is definatly a male due to the anal fin.
What could be happening?
thanks
random919

 

[SamLovesCorys]

Are all it's scales kind of jutting out? It sounds like dropsy. Whack that in google. I'm pretty sure theres nothing you can do though.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Edit: Looking at your stocking, you/your nan should probably get more of both tetra groups to get the numbers up to at least 4 of each. I know its a bit random, just a pointer as tetras are shoaling fish and will be much happier and active in bigger groups.

 

[random919]

yeah. the scaled are sticking out kinda. Thanks for the help. i think it is dropsy. We thought we would see what it was and make sure it was not going to hurt the other fish before we got some more. We are thinking of adding in slowly 4 neons, 2 black tetras and a couple of clown loaches i think or some miniture ones we found at our LFS.

 

[OldMan47]

Dropsy is a symptom description not a disease. You could think of it much like pneumonia which simply mans that the pneumo, the air sacs in the lungs, are swollen. It also is not a disease but a set of symptoms. There is no such thing as a cure for dropsy although there may well be a cure for the underlying problem. What we really need to do is quit accepting that simplistic diagnosis and try to find the underlying problem. Each person who has one time or another had success with some treatment will tell you it is the dropsy treatment that works, and it probably was for the particular problem that they had in their tank. That does not mean that it will have any effect at all for you and your fish. Please do not so easily assume that you know what is wrong and how to treat it. In my own fish club dropsy is the example that a veterinarian used as an example for us to learn about fish disease and how readily we can jump to the wrong conclusions about treatment. It seems that dropsy is one of those things that anyone can recognize by its symptoms but few ever correctly diagnose the underlying disease. I am going to speculate that we never seem to properly diagnose what is wrong because we accept that we have found the disease by naming its symptoms and we fail to truly investigate its cause.

 

[sadguppy]

yeah. the scaled are sticking out kinda. Thanks for the help. i think it is dropsy. We thought we would see what it was and make sure it was not going to hurt the other fish before we got some more. We are thinking of adding in slowly 4 neons, 2 black tetras and a couple of clown loaches i think or some miniture ones we found at our LFS.

Clown loaches are too big for your nan's tank, as they grow around 10inches or bigger and live for a very long time. How about cories instead? They're great little guys.

 

[random919]

i know. we decided against them.