Dizzy, Disoriented... Drunk Looking Guppy

Hypatia

Hypatia

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May 1, 2006
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I have a guppy in my tank that is looking like she is having trouble swimming. She is just kind of floating often, and other times seems to have trouble staying upright... I mean tipping over onto her side. Otherwise though she seems normal... no spots, fin or scale problems, and is eating normally.

I had another sick guppy that I had recently acquired who seemed to have bad fin rot.. or possibly ick. She has been swimming constantly in the higher current area at the back of the tank since I got her, so I hadn’t gotten a good view of her until yesterday. She was pretty torn up, and I euthanized her right away.

My issue, and the reason I was so quick to euthanize the first sick guppy, is that I have two breeding pairs of show quality guppies, one half black blue and the other Moscow green coming in the mail any day now. I had intended to remove most of the fish from the 5.5 to house them there (but I wanted to make sure that it continued cycling at the five fish -2 ottos, 3 guppies- level, until they got here). I really do not intend to have any big time breeding operation... I just wanted truly stunning fish, since I am limited to so few in my small tank... but I certainly do not want to have paid so much to have them die right away from an infection the other guppy brought in.

Does the dizzy behavior sound like it could be related to fin rot or is it something else? I have considered setting up the 20 long that I intend to move the other fish to, and housing the new guppies there for a while... but I don't want to cycle a new tank with $20 show guppies.

What do you think?
 
I had a similar problem recently actually. Wound up losing two female guppies. The affected females couldn't stay upright, and the second one couldn't sink. It almost seemed like she had an air bubble in her system somewhere that was forcing her up to the top. Her head and tail seemed to want to move down into the water, but her midsection kept pulling her up. At one point I actually trapped her at the bottom of the tank under a net (this may sound cruel, but the male guppy in the tank was constantly nipping at her fins to get her to dive under the water). I let her out to feed, but in the end nothing worked and she wound up dying. At the time, I thought maybe she had gulped too much air from the surface (they had both spent a lot of time at the top of the tank with stressed out gills, never found a water imbalance to tell why). I can't really offer a solution to your problem, but I can tell you that no other fish in the tank were affected (which seemed to back up the air gulping theory).
 
Well, I have Moderate water in terms of hardness, and 7.4 for PH.
Guppies can tolerate from 7 up for PH, but do like a higher Ph better.
They also like from Moderate to Hard water in terms of GH and KH or dh.

I am not sure what you mean by they like their PH hard.
 
Sounds some what like a swim bladder issue, but im not that sure.
 
I just ment they like to have a high pH level. I'm from Quebec and water terms are different in French.

Couldn't all that action be from an internal bacterial infection?
 
most probably a swimbladder issue..

how much and how often do u feed ur fish?
overfeeding can sometimes damage the swimbladder of a fish
 
I'm going to echo the swim bladder theory, those are classic signs of the disease though I've never come acrossed it affecting a guppy but I suppose it's not limited to certain fish. Try buying sinking foods so they don't eat at the surface.
 
I've cut back on feeding since the two guppies died. I am also going to start varying their diet (blood worms, brine shrimp, etc). I don't know if those sink, but they have to be better than flakes.
 
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