Loaches Online Forum

When I left for work today I was hoping to get home in enough time to net my VERY pregnant guppy and get her into the breeding tank that I picked up on my way home. However when I got home she was dead. Was she to pregnant?

she was probably sick with bloat/dropsy.

That was kinda what I was thinking. I have had 3 spawnings from two generations of guppies in the past 12 weeks and one fish was incredibly large. I was afraid she had bloat, but she only had a bad case of pragnency.

What is bloat/dropsy? Is it contagious? Could I have stopped it? She was one of my 3 oldest guppies. I only had her for maybe 6 months.

She might very well have had something wrong with the pregnancy, she might have had bloat/dropsy and she could very well have been too old. Guppies only have a life span of about two years, so your six months was a significant chunk of it. I've had a couple of older females do that to me-they get really, really pregnant, they don't look dropsical (no fins standing out, etc.) but they die before giving birth. It doesn't seem to affect the others in the tank. I have always figured maybe they were just too old to give birth, or too worn out-it usually happens after they've already had 2-3 drops.

Ah that might have been why. She has had about that many births.

you can extend the life of guppies by adding a bit of salt and bumping up the GH. But if this tank is not a brackish water tank that has other types of fish, I wouldn't worry about it.

dropsy is a symptom of a few problems. the fish will get a very swollen belly, and the fins stick out so the fish looks a bit like a pine cone. once a fish is like this, it isnt really curable. because it's caused by different things, its hard to say how contagious it is - someone else may know better. fish can get the problem because of disease or bad water

If your fish looked normal (besides being heavily pregnant) I would say that she had complications with birthing the babies. This can be caused by several different things.

First, how large was your female? If a guppy female is raised in a smallish tank (smaller then 20-30 gallons) past several months old she will not get large enough to handle birthing the babies easily. My college roommate had three of her female guppies that she raised from fry in a 10 gallon die of, what I can only describe as, Uterine rupture. These females grew up in the 10 gallon and continued to live in the 10 gallon for their entire lives. They never got bigger then an inch, inch and a half long and were about a third of the body size of the average female you would see in a fish store. After they dropped two or three litters each one of these little girls ended up getting a split in the sack that the fry were developing in (it was visible through the skin). They all died from infection that set into the injury. The lesson here, 5-10 gallon tanks are great as grow out tanks for guppy fry but keeping them in there stunts their growth.

Another thing is that it could just be a normal birth complication. I had one really large (2+in long) feeder guppy female die because she had a fry get stuck on the way out. She eventually pushed out the dead fry but she got an infection (her gravid spot went from black to red) and died from that.

Hope this helps.

If female http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poeciliidae are pregnant, they get a dark/black point in the near of/around the anus, the so called "pregnancy dot/mark/patch".

Did she has this dot?

Geetz
Dirk

The "pregnancy spot" is known in the US as a "Gravid Spot". The females get this when they can become pregnant.

raecarrow wrote:The "pregnancy spot" is known in the US as a "Gravid Spot". The females get this when they can become pregnant.

Hm, I believe, they get it, when they are pregnant, not when they can become pregnant. BTW.

I found this quote on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guppy

After the female guppy is inseminated, a dark area near the anus, known as the gravid spot, will enlarge and darken.

They have the spot before inseminated, it just gets larger and darker once they are pregnant.

Do not recall how big the spot was though I am sure it was there. I do not know where the guppy was raised but for the last 6 months she was in my 100g tank.

Does spotting occur throughout pregnancy or just during the beginning?
I am wondering this because I recently had what I thought was a period (It has been almost a year since I'd had one) but it only lasted a day and my friend pointed out that since it only lasted a day I might have just been spotting and then she said oh! you might be pregnant! lol I don't think I am but that is besides the point, I am curious if spotting during pregnancy would be temporary or last throughout the entire pregnancy....any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
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