Gerald Bassleer examines a colisa gourami with encapsulated worm larvae in its gills, showing severe tissue damage. The parasite cycles through birds, snails, and fish. Encapsulated larvae resist medication, so treatment means better husbandry, biosecurity, and immune-boosting feed instead.
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Hello, dear Akarist, welcome to my next cage on fish disease. And today it's about the colissa, the dwarf gourami, which were suffering. And I had to do a real good examination of the gills so I could show you some interesting details I found in this fish because they had encapsulated worms, metasivkaria in the gills, surprisingly a lot. So it is a short video, but it tells you in fact what you easily can find. Not only in my books on fish diseases, available in different languages, but also in my cases I present on fish diseases. And here we see the kolissa that becomes skinny. You will see in the back, they're getting away from the group, they're not hungry, they're sitting on the side wasting away, getting skinny. And that's the moment you have to take one out and do an examination. And then you examine the gills in this case. And you see a lot of the gills are taken away by, how can I say, some organisms, some big round black particles that take away healthy gill tissue. So I take show you here the video that all that tissue of all the different gills is taken away by those little round circular organisms. And those are encapsulated worm larvae, also called metacercaria. You see how many, so how much healthy guilty issue is left? Well, it's very little. And that of course is affecting the health of the fish. And the fish will not eat waste away and they will die. And here we see one of those encapsulated worm larvae which are still alive and they're waiting to be eaten by a predator. In this case might be a bird, can be a fish. And then the worm larvae will become a big larvae or a big worm. And here to understand the cycle we have to know do this cycle will start when there is a bird dropping larvae in the water that goes into a snail and then this snail will produce another kind of larvae which infects the fish. And then it will be eaten again by the bird head fish. And the cycle is completed for that worm larvae. So just waiting there to be eaten. That's the cycle and that's the way this worm is living through the cycle. And it needs the fish, but we don't need that on our fish. And the fish breeder should not have this kind of problem available. Some of the fish are so badly damaged that they will eventually die. Many can survive for a long time. They might be less infected. No medication can reach through the encapsulated worm because it's well protected. That worm, it only will get out of the capsule when it's eaten by a bird for example like I showed you in the slide before. Try to improve the immunity of the healthy fish which are I mean the healthy fish which are less sick by applying the best conditions so they can live longer. And you can also help with a special functional food like our Dr. Basler die fish food forte or professional care. But anyway the very badly damaged fish you cannot cure avoid a purchase from this breeder because that's the problem that the breeder has created this because he had no biosecurity. Learn more about fish diseases in my books or from my Patreon where you can get some specific training. So this was a special case of an interesting disease rather common in our industry from the wild or from special poor breeding facilities the Metacercaria in the guilds. I have several videos on that so subscribe and watch my other videos on this kind of issue. Thank you for watching.
