Desperatly Need Help! Dying Guppies!

[petitelupin]

Ok, this past friday my boyfriend bought me a ten gallon fishtank for valentines day..ive had a community tank before, so he thought it would be nice. we went to petsmart and bought a trio of guppies, and a sunset gourami..and i had two female bettas that i put in as well, after a day and a half of letting the filter run. so yesterday after giving birth and getting all tore up, one of the female guppies just dies...and this morning the male was dead! the final female is VERY close to dropping, but she keeps pooping out long red strings..and i dunno why? she seems alright though for the most part, and is doing fairly well in the plastic seperator. AND now one of my female betta's is dying! shes a pale pink to begin with, but now her mouth seems whiter and she cant seem to move her head at all..she struggles to swim and now she's hardly moving at all!! what am i doing wrong? the gourami and other betta are completely normal

this is really stressing me out and i would hope to get an answer asap!!

thank you,
hayley

 

[OldMan47]

Welcome to the forum PetiteLupin.
As I see it you are doing 2 things wrong. First you have a very heavy stock level for a 10 gallon which of course makes it harder to keep water quality good. The second is that you put fish into a new tank without cycling the tank's filter first. The essence of that problem is that the filter you got with the tank is just a piece of hardware to support a biological filter. The biological filter takes care of ammonia build up in the tank. Until you have a functional biological filter, any fish in the tank will be threatened by ammonia building up in the water. Each of your fish are contributing to the ammonia so the more there are the worse it gets.
A quick course of action is to do a 50% water change using dechlorinated water. Then go back an hour later and do another 50% water change. After the second water change your fish should start acting better for a little while. That will give you time to get out and find an ammonia testing kit that uses liquid reagents to test for ammonia. A lot of people here use the API master test kit because it comes with other tests that we all end up needing. Another test you will need right away is the nitrite test kit because ammonia gets converted to nitrites and those are also poisonous. The nitrite test is part of the master kit if you go that way.
All of this just gets you ready to monitor the tank's water and do the water changes based on actual readings instead of just doing the emergency changes that I have suggested. The next thing you need to do is read the thread on fish-in cycling. There is a link that will take you there in my signature area. After you have read through that, come back with the questions that you still have.

 

[Athena]

There are several replies to your duplicate thread on this matter in the Emergency section of the forum.

Athena

 

[petitelupin]

thank you very much i went out last night and bought a ph regulator just incase and some other medicines aswell...just so that i'll have them. my neons and gourami are back to normal again and so is my remaining female betta, im going today to buy the test kit...oddly enough, walmart has alot of stuff...im used to living in chicago and having reputable pet stores as opposed to just petsmart and walmart...i've never had this problem before when i used to have african chiclids