I've been noticing dead guppies at the rate of 1 a week at the bottom of the tank for weeks. Also a huge outbreak of carnivorous snails which are eating the dead guppies, which is great in a way I guess, balanced biosystem and all, except I would rather not have a snail tank, but a guppy tank and I worry the snails have brought in a weird neurological disease impacting the guppies. I'll include a few pics below, but the guppies are burrowing head-first into the rocks that I use as substrate while alive to die there like that (the one in the pics was between rock very deep, I move the rocks to see if he was alive and he is, and swam a bit then went back to this position here). I can shoo him out, but he just burrows back in there to die. No, I don't have a water testing kit, and yes it could be water parameters. I'll add a dash of Seachem Prime in case it's something that can solve, but outside of that there's not much I can do. I don't live in range of a pet center to take water to be tested and can't afford a testing kit. Any idea on why my guppies are doing this and what might be the cause? I just got these to be the colors/patterns I wanted for the pond next summer and now they are all suiciding! I'm tempted to add a good dose of salt to kill all these snails and keep vaccing them out as they die. If anyone knows what causes head down burrowing in fresh water fish, please let me know!
(I had just fed when I took these photos, there is a lot of left-over food in the tank at the moment but I was afraid I was under-feeding them and they were starving to death so I'd starting feeding more over the past week and I do plan to vac the gravel later today)
(I had just fed when I took these photos, there is a lot of left-over food in the tank at the moment but I was afraid I was under-feeding them and they were starving to death so I'd starting feeding more over the past week and I do plan to vac the gravel later today)