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This information is going to be especially useful for those of you who have ponds. Before this past month, I honestly had no idea there were so many common invaders waiting for your pond fish to weaken enough to attack and kill. I only wish I had known sooner. Because maybe I could have saved him if I had known the proper treatments to use. But now I know what I'm looking at when I view a skin scrape under the microscope, and I'm going to share that with you.
I thought by looking at him that the biggest issue we had to deal with was the fungal infection and potential secondary bacterial infections. While I treated those successfully, I didn't learn until later, too late actually, that the damaged tissue was also a perfect breeding ground for Chilodonella, Costia, Epistylis, Trichodina, and Tetrahymena...just to mention a few.
trooper_final.jpgI'll start with a photo of Trooper taken on 4-20-2010. If you read the first blog about him, you'll notice the incredible improvement. I know he had a long way to go, but a lot of the fungus was gone, there was no external sign of infection, he was eating (up until 2 days before he died, when he abruptly stopped eating), there was some regeneration of damaged fins, and the black spots on him were a sign of healing tissue. It's common in goldfish, but you usually see the flat, stationary black spots after ammonia burn, when the skin is healing. However, raised black spots that move around the fish are a whole different issue, and shouldn't be passed off as healing.
Now onto the nasty things the microscope revealed. The videos I'm posting here are actual videos recorded from skin scrapes I took from Trooper.
I think this one is Chilodonella sp. It thrives in lower temperatures so you will usually see an outbreak during the early Spring when a pond fish may have a lowered resistance due to a cold winter.
This one is definitely Epistylis sp. It doesn't actually feed on the fish, but does attach to the skin and can cause secondary infections. It's also known as 'False Fungal Disease'. This one explains why the anti-fungal meds weren't getting rid of this last bit of what I thought was fungus.
This one, I think, is Costia. Notice how they are wobbly in their movement. This is an identifier. They are hard to find because;
1. They are really really small.
2. They are known to pick an area on a fish and colonize in that spot. You could do several skin scrapes and never find them.
I'm only posting this one because it's the very last video I took and I have no idea what it is. If anyone figures it out, please tell me.
All of these are supposed to be intolerant of salt, however some have developed a resistance to salt and some medications. I was using salt in my treatment, but unfortunately I found out too late that it's necessary to use salt at 0.3% to even begin to knock these out. Formalin is also used to kill these parasites, but you can't mix Formalin and salt at high doses without potentially killing the fish, especially when they are weak to start.
Ultimately I don't know exactly what killed Trooper. I could assume his gills were infested and he suffocated, but in death his mouth was closed and his gills were closed. I could be wrong, but I would expect his mouth to be open and gills flared. I could have done a gill scrape and viewed that on the microscope, but I just couldn't do it. When he was alive, it would have been too traumatic to get a gill scrape without anesthesia, and I didn't want to use anesthesia on him without knowing what I was dealing with. For all I know, he wouldn't have woken back up. After he died, I just didn't want to violate his little body. One day I'll be able to get my head right and actually perform a necropsy, but for now I just can't.
I hope this experience will be helpful to someone.
