Very Scrawney Platies

[cell]

at my LPS there are several tanks full of platies, they have reds, and milk moons, and tuxedos, and sunsets, aswell as some assoted mixes. i've been in there twice looking at PLaties for my new tank set up and i've noticed that in the red platy tanks there are several scrawny as anything platies. what coudl cause this? not ALL the platys' are scrawney in the tank, and none of the other tanks have skinny fish. could this be a disorder? or that they aren't geting enough food? what could cause a malnourished fish? parasites?

 

[Undawada]

I suppose they could be underfed. Fish can do quite well on a small amount of food, over a long period of time, so it would have to be serious neglect to cause them to shrink visibly (weeks without food, perhaps).

I would guess more likely it is an internal parasite. Although the parasites I've had experience with cause bloating, my guess is that this parasite is causing the fish to be malnourished.

I've also noticed fish seem to "shrink" when in bad water conditions.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Sounds like wasting desease; wasting desease can be caused by many things like water quality problems and internal bacteria/parasites but basically it is caused when the fish gets sick and stops eating; it can also by caused by harrassment by other fish but you get the jist of it.
Most lfs will always have one fish affected by this but if there are alot i would avoid buying fish from this lfs until the problem is sorted.

 

[Undawada]

Good to know, I've never heard of that before, thanks!

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Thats ok , wasting deasese isn't realy a desease as such but just a term to to call the behavior of a stressed/sick fish when it stops eating

 

[GSD]

sounds like parasites or underfeading!my platy went kinda like this when it was bullied though

 

[WILDER]

Being skinny can be a number of things, what does it look like when the fish go to the toilet, is the anus red and inflamed, can you see anything protruding from the anus, is the belly area sunken in, livebearers can be prone to internal parasites, also is there any deformaties apart from being skinny, like a bent spine.

 

[Def]

Also try and watch the platy swim. Platys should swim in straight, accurate lines. If they "wobble" slightly when swimming it's a sign of poor health and it's quite often downhill to death from there.

 

[cell]

thanks for the info all! they only seem to have one affected tank, so i didn't buy anything from it and i inspected the other tanks before buying fish. the other fish look fine, maybe it was a problem with that specific shipment of fish. this store isn't my preffered store but its righht down the road andits the better of the 2 stores in my area. if i wanna travel 30 minutes into the city there is a awesome all fisah only store that quarentines all their fish and so on, but i can't always make it there. thanks for being so kind!

 

[WILDER]

You could always try an internal parasite med if there are alot of them that are skinny.