Helping Your Guppy To Stay Healthy Much Longer

Guppies today are a lot less hardy than they were several decades ago.

Over the past century, there have been some factors contributing to their decline in hardiness: intensive breeding based on appearance instead of disease resistibility, over-reliance on medication resulting in new forms of medication-resistant parasites, global transportation of guppies with viruses and bacteria that local guppies have no immunity to.

Therefore, whether you are a guppy novice or someone who has been successful with breeding other fish, keeping guppies healthy is no mean feat, and is a discipline requiring constant, intensive care. To do that, we have to know what disease that causes them to have ill health and to prevent them from occurring.

Disease. You may think you can keep your well-scrubbed tank with its newly-cleansed filtration system disease-free, but do not be mistaken.

When new guppies are introduced into a tank, they bring along bacteria, fungi and parasites on their scales and in their intestines. These can then get transferred to your hands and nets. Hence, no aquarium can ever be free of infection sources.

Different types of food such as live and frozen food, or even dry flakes, increase the risk of introducing diseases against which your guppies have not develop an immunity.

An enclosed ecological system is at a disadvantage compare to a natural body of water, as guppies cannot escape when conditions get unfavorable. A tank’s fish population is also of a much higher density than that in the wild, and the fish are entirely dependent on your sanitation and feeding methods.

Disease is a fact of life for guppy breeders, and unfortunately, there is no one successful method to prevent this from happening.

Prevention. In every sense of the word, prevention is better than cure considering how less hardy guppies are today.

Any chance of curing fish disease lie within the first two to three days of the onset of the symptoms. Treating them with medication will help buy time while the fish tries to ward off the disease with its own immune system.

If you detect disease only after three days, it will probably be better to euthanize your guppies and bleach the tank.

Early detection can help save the day. Keep a keen eye for unusual symptoms your guppies may be exhibiting when cleaning their tanks or feeding. Tank conditions such as cloudy water also act as warning signals that something has gone wrong. The longer you rear guppies, the more trained your eye will be in diagnosing problems.

Though guppy breeders have their favorite treatments, there is no one cure for any disease. Even if a treatment works the first time, it may not work the next. And while certain symptoms provide obvious clues for treating your fish, others are not so direct.

For example, bloating and constipation may signify dropsy. In such cases of uncertainty, consider bringing your fish to a veterinarian who treats fish regularly. He or she can perform water tests, make the appropriate diagnosis and recommend treatment.

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