What Happened?

[princess-lozza]

Hey guys,
A few weeks ago my male mickey mouse platy went from his normal orangy colour to an almost yellowy colour, with his black 'mickey mouse' symbol going grey. He was still swimming around fine and appeared to have had no other problems -skin, fins etc. The water was all normal and the other two platys were fine. After about a week he went back to normal, so i put it down to stress as it happened after a water change.

Yesterday his girlfriend gave birth to their babies and he just died. He was all pale and laying on his side at the bottom. After a little while, when i was sure he was dead, i pulled him out and gave him a closer inspection. There was nothing wrong with him. The only thing i can think of is that he was just weak, as his sister died straight after getting her home from the shop.

Has anyone else experienced this? Did i do anything wrong?

Thanks

 

[LauraFrog]

This sounds like it might be something wrong with the shop.

Going grey/pale and then going back to normal sounds kinda like fish pox - a grey or whitish waxy coating appears on the body, gets worse, lasts for about a week and then vanishes. It's annoying because it isn't fatal but it's incurable. Was there any sign of a waxy coating?

I had one fish die exactly like that but she was old, seriously old, and I was kind of expecting her to go.

When you brought the fish home from the shop, did you float the bag on top of the water and let the temperatures equalise? Then did you mix a tiny bit of tank water with the water in the bag? If the fish weren't acclimatised properly it can shock them enough to kill them. Still not sure though - I have forgotten to acclimate properly with platy fry and had them swim away fine with, like a five degree difference in water temperature!
How long have you had the fish? It's not common for fish to die as soon as you bring them home unless they're sick already or didn't travel well and aren't acclimatised properly. How far away is the LFS where you bought them?

I bought one fish from a fish-abusing chainstore hoping that I could salvage her (fins nipped to half their size and horribly skinny) but she died two weeks later not much I could do really.

 

[princess-lozza]

I don't think he had any sort of waxy coating. Maybe he was just stressed. It seemed a bit of a random thing to happen.

She should have been acclimatised properly as all the others were fine with it. She died overnight, so she must have died within just a few hours. The LFS is about 5 minutes away and we drove, so i don't think there would have been any problems there. They said she must have been weak, so i just took that as an explanation.

Thanks for helping anyway