Gerald Bassleer examines bumblebee gobies dying after import with parasitic worms in their gills and bacterial skin infections. The encapsulated metacercaria deform the gills and can't be treated in the tank. He recommends euthanasia for the weakest fish, supportive feeding with live food, and probiotics to fight secondary infections.
Questions this video answers
Case 124
Brachygobius doriae (bumblebee goby)
Gerald Bassleer
July 23, 2023
Chapters
Hello. Dear aquarists, today my fish disease Case 124 about the bumblebee goby. Bumblebee gobies are very cute and nice fish specimen which are collected in the wild, but sometimes they cause problems. And here I will discuss the case of this Brachyhobius doriae, or the bumblebee goby, with a parasitic worm infection and a bacterial infection. Here you see him swimming in the aquarium and you see that some are getting skinny, emaciated, they're getting very weak. They don't eat and some will die. So every day there were some losses reported after the import of this bumblebee goby. We took some skin scraping of that fish and we found lots of bacteria. Here you see it in the fluid, spotted and stolid bacteria. Here we see it. On another part of the scraping here you see the big colonies of bacteria which were collected. We see some of the stags here. So that's a lot of bacterial load on the skin. Then we found the nigills, encapsulated metacercaria or larvae of digenetic trematodes. You see them here, you see them here, you see an auto part here. See here and here and here and here. And they're deforming the gills and making the gills a poor respiratory organ. So the fish of course will suffer and get weak and get other infections, particularly like bacterial infections. And here in the video we go inside the fish here we see parts of the intestine with a little bit of food inside, not so much food to see. And we found eventually here encapsulated nematodes in it. We see here the spleen, which is in bad shape. We see here the liver, which is in bad shape. And well, showing that this fish was in a very poor condition, of course with worms and secondary bacterial infections. So, well, those who are suffering very badly, well, you will not be able to treat because to be honest, the encapsulated worms cannot be treated and that weakens the fish and that the treatment doesn't allow to penetrate and kill the worm. The worm is just waiting there and to be eaten by a predator, bird or fish, and then it become a larger worm. So the fish is just an intermediate host here in this case. And the fish get weak and then secondary bacterial infections do occur and they will not eat and they will waste away. The most weak specimens will not survive. So the two weak fish, they are too weak to start eating or to regenerate. And we would recommend to utinize them with an archamore plus from aquarium unster which is one of the soft and easy ways to put fish asleep an antibacterial treatment with antibiotics could help the fish some of the fish you can at least you can try it it's important to get them eating with food like good quality Artemia mosquito larvae that's the kind of food of what this kind of goby likes to eat and you can supplement it with functional additives or probiotics or prebiotics and check your supply because it might be that the suppliers should get you better fish the supply is usually an area where those fish coming from poor environment or just a lot of risk of getting infected and some river parts are better than the other ones so the fisherman should get be informed should be informed and to take appropriate actions where he can so this is a special case about the bumblebee gobi which I've seen often coming down with this problem so I just want to share my findings with you and I hope it helps you in you dealing with.
