Hello from Central Florida

[Alesha]

It's good to see a few other Floridians here! 😉 

My name is Alesha. My husband and I have a 55-gallon with guppies, shrimp, assassin snails and pygmy dwarf loaches. OH, and yeah, pond and ram's horn snails, too. (Thus the team of assassins and loaches.) We also have a 20-long tank for our little crooked-spine guppies, the majority of the ram' horn snails and one red-tail botia loach. (Long sad story there, but we call her "Peek-a-boo" because she rarely pops her head out of her Cave; and we think she's beautiful and do everything we can to make her feel happy and safe.)

We found Cory on IG while doing research to re-immerse ourselves in the fish world after years without an aquarium. We adopted a special needs kiddo who required LOTS of our energy for many years and we had none left over for pets. He's fairly stable now at age 20, although still non-verbal and non-mobile and requires 24-hour care, but we decided to try fish again and we all enjoy our tanks so much!

This is really my first forum. I hit social media around the time that blogging was hot, so I've done that, but forums are new to me. I'm looking forward to learning a lot and making new friends.

Alesha

[Daniel]

Whoa! That's an boat load of guppies! Is that a community breeding tank? It looks totally wild.

[Alesha]

It is a community tank. And it's guppies and endlers...so yeah, it's a breeding tank, too, by default. We started with 14 guppies last June. (Had no idea what endlers were, but one of the guppy mamas had several fry that were endlers. We love them!) We had well over 500 in this tank at one time. They have been dying off over the past several months. I've treated repeatedly for parasites - using maracyn, paracleanse and aquarium salt, - but nothing seems to work. I'm losing about a dozen a day. And yes, it's been almost impossible to keep the parameters right with that kind of bioload. We're hoping the loss will level off at some point.

We've given some away to friends, we've dropped off at our LFS and now this die off:  We have waaaaaay fewer than we had before. 

Here's a pic from January, before we started losing fish.