Please, don't
anyone take this wrong -- I'm not trying to argue or disprove anything Dave or anyone else has to say. I'm only trying to learn, and if this was a classroom setting, I/we would all be able to ask questions, to clarify, and to validate things we see. That's what I'm trying to accomplish here. I want to LEARN, and as we all know, there is a lot more to learn than what we find on the internet....
Call this "taking the fish to the doctor for a health check-up." We all know how doctors ask all those [annoying] questions (that's an inside joke -- I'm married to a physician, not to mention that I teach the MEDICINE MB for Boy Scouts
) as well as do a physical exam. And when the cats go to the vet with a problem, I try to anticipate what they'll ask so I can take notice beforehand.
Firstly can we ask why you have ruked out popeye when your fish can already be suffering from it
A fish koi or goldfish does not need to have bugging out eyes to be suffering from popeye Maggie.
Looking closely at your golffishes eyes you could say that they are slightly pronounced , so one cannot for the moment eule it out .
Dave
I guess my definition of "pop eye," and what I'm seeing in this fish (and the one before that died) are not the same. Soooooo, here's where I'm coming from: To me, as a medically-trained person, "pop-eye," or exophthalmia is an enlargement/protrusion of the eyeball. This fish doesn't really have that. Technically, it has exlarged corneas. In a brief Google search, I ran across this mention of "megalocornea," and the way this author differentiates "megalocornea" from "pop-eye." Granted, this was from an old book, but it does point this out. I just pulled this up because it did mention it -- the article was about something else, like calcium deficiency.
But, for now, let's call it "pop-eye." Apples & oranges!
But that's not all that's going on with this little guy, and if his problems progress like the last fish, then he's going to start listing to port [or starboard] --
he's already a little "unsteady." From there, the other fish went on to develop "dropsy," though it was mild [more just the pineconing than any bloating]. And from there, the other fish went downhill untill I brought out the clove oil.
And by unsteady, it's like someone who's had a little too much happy juice.....
Is he eating? Don't know 'cause I haven't fed him, but he acts hungry and responds when I approach.
He's listless, but responds to stimuli, and does swim around spontaneously.
His repirations appear normal with normal looking gill movement -- I haven't done more than a quick peak at the gills, however.
On several searches for information about eye problems, Corneybacteriosis in fish has come up several times --
NOT saying this is what he has, though. They mentioned head enlargement as an occompaning symptom. But I don't know if they meant intercranial pressure or an actual, visible enlargement of the head. Intercranial pressure would be the cause of the "pop-eye" symptom. Anyway, I went through my pics looking for an old shot of this same fish to use as a comparison. These are about 14 months apart [and the best one I could find from back then]. The only thing I notice is a little more bulging over the gill cover, but that could be normal for growth.
I've established
good water quality, which has been consistent. I have plenty of aeration via spitters, filter outputs, and air stones. I recently bought a test kit for disolved oxygen -- showing DO as >8 [somewhere between 8 & 12].
I do
water changes and keep my filters clean and flushed, as well as net crud off the bottom [no BD].
No new fish since mid-April of this year. They were QT'd for just over 4 weeks. I didn't scrape them, but they didn't show any obvious problems. They came from RainGarden in Hawaii. The last fish that died was one of these.
No environmental stressors [that I'm aware of] except 1) frequent thunderstorm during the Spring, and 2) elevated water temp [>90F] for about a week until I got shade up.
No alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine use [that I'm aware of -- but I can't say what they do at night.....]
Have lost about 1/2 dozen fish since the spring thunderstorms [using that as a reference-in-time]. These deaths were spread out, with usually about a month in between. Some were found dead, but a few were still alive. The ones I was able to scrape showed nothing under the scope. Except for the last one [a month ago], I wasn't able to observe anything unusual -- I've already mentioned similarities with the current sick fish.
Of the fish that have died, they varied in size & age. And, there have been a few fish that have mysteriously disappeared....never accounted for.....so no idea if they died or something got them. I would just notice that this or that fish wasn't there anymore...... I want to say that some of those did disappear before I started actually finding the dead/dying fish.
And
@Dave 54 I answered about the "ocular" in a PM, but that might be something that would interest others on here.
SORRY THIS IS SO DARN LONG
, but had a lot to say..... Whew!
