Good luck with the fry!

Congratulations on the new guppies, You will be able to keep them separately from your others for a bit?

A couple of responses, not guaranteed to be accurate on the mystery deaths, but they are oh, so sincere: ;)

As for the mysterious vanishing of that one fry, while I lean towards those black helicopters snatching him, it is likely that the fry died and your tank, with a good biological system, just "took care" of that little body & "that quickly". Cannibalism by his small compatriots, may have played a share. Lots of aquarists have been astonished at how quickly a larger corpse has "returned to nature."

I would give some consideration to the explanation that your new shrimp had a craving for a fishwich or fry sandwich. If you have a dead fry, nasty as this sounds, can you drop it near him to gage his response?

Recently read the account by "McDaphnia" (predictably one of the great Net sources of info on live foods) where grass shrimp perched on Java moss and tried to pick off small Heterandria formosa. Once in a while they were successful in capturing fry of this smallest livebearer in the North America. Those shrimp are a lot smaller than yours.

"#1 the others hated him and would not let him eat, starving him to death..."

If he was at the bottom of the pecking order, he would probably die first when an illness hit the tank.

Have you been feeding frozen brine shrimp? Are you defrosting it and rinsing it before feeding? The reason I unkindly suggest this is that a lot of unexplained fry deaths are because of velvet. Sometimes we see the clamped, arrow shape of a tail, Other times the disease (which thrives in the presence of decaying b.s.) kills fry so fast, that there is no evidence of what happened. Do you have pond snails picking up the pieces? Humm you do have that shrimp.

If this sort of rings a bell, check out velvet in the Quicklinks and

Need Help Desparately from Guppy Experts    
Health and Medicine
By krickkett273 [Edit User]
from the Rita department, Section Ask Guppylog
Posted on Mon Dec 13th, 2004 at 05:27:45 PST

I fear that this isn't very satisfactory, but it is one possible explanation.

And in the meantime, do a partial water change tomorrow with seasoned, treated water, slightly warmer than the tank. ;)