Why My Guppies Died - Avoid These Mistakes In Your Guppy Tank Setup!

I think you just had bad luck , guppies are fine at 6.0 6.5 ph . Mines at 6.5 basically but my gh/kh is up at around 10 , yeah northumberland weird water. I have also heard certain water conditioners can starve your good bacteria, best advice I got when setting up down here from back home is don't chase ph just keep it at a steady level . But loosing that many I feel your pain .

how do you euthanize a fish humanely?

If it's high end strains, that is the problem. They are very sensitive to not perfect water. Most will order twice as many as wanted and hope you get babies, before they die. The next generation is usually fine. But Nitrate needs to be under 20, absolute zero Ammonia and Nitrite. Only fully matured tanks!

My condolences.... I just purchased a 20 gallon tank yesterday.... planning on starting some kind of "dirted" tank.... Will be introducing guppies in a month or so.... I hope if I can get it going properly....Thank you for doing a video of your experiences for the rest of us to learn !! 🙂🙃🙂😎

That’s too many fish to cycle a tank.

One thing that always gets me about these "professional" fish keeper videos, is that in my 50+ years of fish keeping, all types except salt water, I've NEVER had ammonia spikes, nitrogen trouble etc. Never had "weak" guppies. Over crowding from the fish over breeding was the only problem I've ever had. Ive kept them in Boones farm wine bottles with just an air stone, styrofoam coolers, plastic buckets etc. Never had a problem. Sometimes it just folks over think their set ups or are just impatient or the fish arrive already on their way out thought they look otherwise healthy.

this video could of been 30 seconds long, and could of just been titled "Just don't use aquasoil". I don't know what people's obsession with using 40 different products in an attempt to out engineer nature is. It's kinda narcissistic if you think about it. I would bet money, that if you just did absolutely nothing, a lot of your guppies would survive, but you seem to think fiddling with them every day and pouring chemicals on them will help. Create natural conditions and your fish will thrive

Hi I lost 3 lots of guppies 48 in all, with the same issues you had, it ended up being killers in the tank, it had nothing to do with water parameters, fin rot, temperature, fungas, it was stress abd actually being killed by Damsonfly Nymphs, 27 in all, the eggs were laud in the plants, they ied in the night because this is when they hunt, you can't see them they hide.
Please take all plants out and fish, strip tank, vacuum substrate or run a net systematically through it, leave the plants and decorations out of water as Nymphs need water to breath, they can breath through their butt, they burrow into substrate and stick their butt out to breath.
I could not believe how many of these killers were in my tank, you simply just can't see them until you strip it. I also put in bubblers etc.
This is not your fault, I bet you it is Dragonfky or Damsonfly Nymph that have hatched out of eggs in your plants and now hunt your fish.
Goid Luck.

You mentioned you have soft water in the video, Did you add minerals to increase the GH ( general hardness) of the water. Guppy thrive in hard water, soft water could have been the issue.

Good of you to post this sad tale of your loss. It's never pleasant to recount painful experiences, and I do sympathise with you. I haven't kept guppies for years, and I was fortunate enough to have acquired some wild stock from an importer not long after I started keeping tropical fish. I have to say at this point that I was an aquarium technician at the University of London at that time, and had access to resources that aquarists wouldn't normally have. The guppies did very well for me and I ended up giving many away. Quite a few went to the Botany Department into some aquatic plant culture bins to keep epiphytic algae down, where the offspring stayed for over 12 years without management. No issues with diseases or parasites. After giving some to an aquarist who mixed them with his fancy lines - THEY ALL DIED.

Comments and observations. You didn't mention what sort of filtration you were running, although I thought I saw a sponge. Transport temperatures aside, you didn't quarantine the fishes. Any ensuing problems would have been contained and easily controlled. Relying on ammonia to kick-start nitrification is not ideal, the growth rate of nitrifying bacteria is slow, about 6 weeks at 24°C in a 2 litre filter in 100 litres tank. Raising the temperature to 37°C (before adding plants) shortens this period to 10 days. Adding dirty media from an established tank/filter can do so similarly. Consider changing your test kits. Any ammonia test that cannot read below 0.05mg.L is not worth it. O2 is not an issue in large tanks, especially at the low stocking density you had. The fish would have survived without aeration; there are many people out there who don't aerate their tanks.

You didn't enquire of the sellers what the water chemistry was that the fishes were being kept in. This would have given you time to prepare the tank water accordingly. A short email, a lot of heartache saved. Also, many ebay sellers don't hold any stocks : they order them in as their orders accrue to a level where they can place a reasonable shipment order. This means they are trans-shipping, which places additional transport stress on the fishes. I could be wrong, but this has been my experience on more than one occasion.

The fishes arrived infected. No doubt. Serious infections/infestations do not arise spontaneously in new setups. Post-transport stress facilitated a drop in immune response allowing the resident pathogens to proliferate. From my observations, there appeared to have been more than one pathogen. Tail rot, fin rot really, may not have been a primary infection; the mucus on one fish was opaque and folding, two elements that are more symptomatic of a parasitic infestation (Chilodonella, Trichodina or Gyrodactylus) rather than a bacterial one. Maybe even guppy disease, T. corlissi, this can manifest as fuzziness on the skin, which can be confused with fungus, but it is difficult to draw a meaningful diagnosis from a video of moving fishes. Therefore, your treatment may have failed because of misdiagnosis. Overnight mortalities are not unknown. Dragonfly larvae are rare in tropical aquaria in the UK, you would have to be very unlucky to have one arrive attached to a plant. Plus, when they attack, they stay attached to their victim until they are bloated. They are not nocturnal as one commenter suggested, rather, they hide when not hunting and can easily be seen in the day. Did you find any during your teardown?

To blame 'poor or weak' genes is a rather empty argument unless it can be proved that a particular genetic line is susceptible to a particular disease, or a suite of diseases, and that the health of the line improves once the disease-inducing sequence is deleted. I think what we are dealing with here is poor quality stock. Mass breeding produces a percentage of sub-par individuals that should be culled out at every stage of the production process. These individuals will harbor pathogens at the subclinical level and, when subjected to stress, their resistance drops and the pathogens proliferate. These fish, then subsequent to the stressor, cannot raise their immune system (immunoglobulins) quick enough to combat the assault, and subsequently die. Healthy individuals can also carry a pathogen burden but can raise their immunity level quickly to respond to an attack from the pathogen, and their tissue repair mechanisms can repair the damage caused by the pathogen before a secondary opportunistic infection can occur. Thus, some of the stronger fish survive. Quarantine new fish every time.

I too experienced the same problem. Other fishes like red cherry barb, harlequeen rasbora survive in my tank but guppies last mostly a month. Actually these genetically modified fancy guppies are genetically weaker.

I'm not at all surprised by your problems! The setting is by no means healthy and cannot be brought into balance using chemistry. Take a look at Father Fish to see how to do something like this correctly!

I agree what @wintersdark also said. It's definitely not oxygen problem. None of my tanks have airstones rather they have surface agitation. Even with co2 pumped it's not a problem.

From my experience with all my guppies, I had similiar issues. Perfect temp, water parameters, hard water, 76 degree temp, etc. and 4-6 hour drip accumulation sometimes longer and they still might die. I noticed, they also die in the night usually or a few days after giving birth. They are super weak,and get stressed out quickly especially tank moves. Some of my new guppies will develop fin rot as well but usually easy to treat if you catch it quick. I noticed the fry are usually stronger than the parents when raised in my tanks so as long as I get fry I dont' care if the parents die. It's not just you, it seems from the forums it happens to a lot of people for no reason with other fish surviving but guppies dying, usually the female.

Being a guppy lover I am happy to come across a video that gives beginners in the hobby any information that may save them from having a problem that they can avoid. Thanks.

From what you described, I see 2 issues:
- one, you have soft water. I find it funny how so many of us fish keepers try to keep fish unsuited for our water. For example, the ones with soft water try to keep guppies and other livebearers. I'm no better, as I try to maintain a rather large population of neon tetras while my water has a PH of 7.4 and hardness over 20 dGh, because I consider livebearers as too common, lol. If I would have your water I would have fill my tanks with hundreds of neons...can we exchange water? 😋
- second, I think you should have place the guppies in a quaratine tank, acclimate them to your "manufactured" hard water (whatever process you use to harden your water), and doze salt, I saw the stuff performing miracles, bringing back to "life" fish with rot and swim bladder issues. I would have said to doze the tank, but the shrimps and other invertebrates would not have tolerated it, so the dozing would had to take place in a separate tank.

Thats horrible. So sorry you had to experience this and thank you for sharing it with us so we can learn

I don’t know if I did something wrong but one of my guppies died rapidly and randomly. Just this afternoon I noticed he was doing a death spiral and not 20 mins later after I am about to get him into quarantine he is not even breathing anymore. Ugh…

I doubt it's an oxygen problem - I've never heard of a O2 problem being a reason while you've got an air stone running. You're adding o2 both due to surface agitation with your HOB and the bubbles, and you're not adding CO2, so that's not really likely.

I think it's much more likely a combination of disease and weak guppies. It's been my even more limited experience that guppies tend to die with even small amounts of stress. I had 6, and had them just fine in a 10g for a couple months. After a couple weeks of cycling a 40g breeder with seachem stability (it's eventually going to be home to Amazon Puffers) I moved the guppies in there. 0ppm ammonia and nitrates even with daily ghost feedings, 60g of water volume, but when I went to move the guppies I noticed one had died already. I'd seen all 6 two days prior, so it was pretty recent. 5 went into the 40. Same temp, same water, but still with a one hour drip acclimation.

Also moved an Amano and mystery snail.

One was looking weak almost immediately. The remaining 4 chased it until it hid. It was gone the next day. Then of the 4 remaining, three picked another to exile. It was gone a day later. Now I have 3, and one of those 3 has been exiled.

It's a huge tank, densely planted, good parameters for guppies, but they're dying. No visible fin damage or fungus. Just weakening and dying rapidly.

I've never found a corpse, but between snails and the Amano I'm unsurprised.

If I do guppies again, I think I'll do a mixed group and let them breed. The group of males seems to get very internally aggressive as soon as one isn't 100%, and they seem to not be 100% very easily.