Guppy Down!

[GuppyDude]

My mom just started up a 55g tank, she has an extensive under gravle filter and a hanging filter with one of those pipes hangin down into the water. well she's had these fish a few days now and we awoke one morning to find one of them had been badly injured somehow. half of his tail fin was stripped, all that was left were the rays, no finage left, and the body part of his tale where the fins starte is missing quite a few scales, i can only guess that he got his rear end sucked into that hanging pipe. hes in a 1g bowl with and air stone going, i added stress coat, melafix, and salt in to keep off infection and try to get him goin again. as u can imagine he is very stressed out, he cant really swim well with the damage to his tail and doesn't appear to even be moveing it much, my guess is that it hurts him pretty bad, but he is aware, does put some effort into moveing around the best he can. if he can make it throgh teh night he'll be in the clear. i tryed feeding him blood worms but hes not in the eating mood. anyone here have something they can add?

 

[WILDER]

How's the guppy doing now, put a pair of tights over the flow pipe in the tank, to stop it happening again, good luck.

 

[GuppyDude]

yea thats what we are gunna do, its a big filter, so im not surprised this happend, just didn't expect it.

unfortunately he's looking pretty bad now, his tail end is swolen where the scales have been ripped off and the remaining rays that used to make up his tail are just fluff pretty much, i dont see any real hope for him. but i would like to try sumthing, i think he is being weighed down by his useless bundle of rays and thats keeping him from being mobile, i mean even if i cut the stuff off, he wont be able to be real manuvable but it seems to be putting alot of stress on his tail end and thats probably bothering him quite a bit. what do you guys think, should i try to cut away teh rays down to a point where they arn't as much of a burdan? how would i go about this if i can do it?

 

[tttnjfttt]

When you say his tail is looking fluffy, do you mean there is fungus growing on his tail?

 

[WILDER]

How much of the tail are we talking about, he sounds like he is suffering, if it has fluffy bit on the tail sounds like fungus which can grow on dead tissue.

 

[GuppyDude]

a fishes tail is made up of rays and between those rays are like webbing, guppys have many many rays close together and when he got his tail in teh filter it stripped the webbing off of the rays so all that was left were just teh rays, without teh coloring and webbing it looked like fluff. he also have his scales stripped off up about 1/4 of his body. unfortuneately he didn't make it, i dont think there was a whole lot i could have done for him because of teh extent of his injurys, except keep off infection, but even that didn't help him much, im willing to bet there were some inturnal injurys as well. my mum is going to be putting somthing around the filter pipe to keep other fish from suffering teh same fate, i feel bad that we only had the little guy for a couple days, was kind of an awful way to die thank you guys for all your help.

 

[WILDER]

Sorry he didn't sound good,R.I.P. yes get the filter outlet sorted straight away.