Fish disease case nr. 68 Platy with fatty degeneration

Dear aquarists, today we have a case of a very common fish in our aquarium hobby. It's about the platy. And platy are very commonly available, coming from many different breeders because they are usually pond raised fish, usually coming from Asia, sometimes also from Israel, also from East Europe, most of them are coming from Asia. And there is a particular problem which I want to share with you with this kind of fish because it has a history which we should think about when we are dealing with this fish and how to overcome this problem. And it's about fatty degeneration and bacterial infections in this platy. Scientific name is Xiphophorus maculatus. And this group, well, there's not much we can see. There's not any clear disease symptoms which I could show you here. You can see a few here, like this one here, seeming a little bit awkward, a little bit strange. Some have some damaged tails. Every day in about a group of three or 400, there's maybe one dead or two dead fish which are not eating anymore. Here we see this very awkward, strange behavior. You see someone hanging here in the corner, you see some damaged fins. And that's all we can see on the fish. And some are slowly wasting here. Here we see one on the top. Here we see the tail, which is a piece out of it. And the fish is somewhat becoming skinny also. But are there typical disease symptoms? No, I cannot say any typical disease. So what we did, we take some scrapings from the SK and on the skin we found some colonies of pathogenic bacteria. All those tiny, tiny black spots here, you see them moving, the little, tiny bacteria, those are millions of bacteria causing a bacterial load on the skin of the fish. And this might be a primary or a secondary infection. Well, we will see what my examination of the fish will bring us around. But this is something which is of course affecting the life of the fish. When we examined the gills, we took the gills out. We see those white areas here in the middle, in between the gills. This is not normal. This should be a healthy tissue. Here we see they're large here, all the lamellae gone. So they are disappeared, like there are necrotic wastes going. Now here we see some stressed parts of the gills, the red bleeding areas. Some other parts are still somewhat healthy. But you can see that the gills of the fish are not in good shape. They somewhere seems to have been going through a problem, stress or what else, causing a bad respiration, causing also a risk of weakening and then dying of the fish. When we took the organs out of the fish. And we put it on our microscopic slide. We squeeze it between two glass plates. We could see a lot of fatty tissues, fatty organs. It's all in between here, between the intestine. Here is the spleen. Here is the part of the liver. We could see a lot of fat, some reddish parts. We can see a lot of fat, greasy material. That is what we see then in the microscope next to the liver, which is the liver here, which should be normally nice brown tissue, but it isn't. You can see that the whitish, fatty parts of. In the liver, you see the little holes or the clear, how can I say, holes appearing at the liver. Not a consistent good tissue. You see all the greasy fat around it. These are fatty organs. We call that fatty organs, fatty degeneration. And we see some red patches in the liver, which is not normal. It should be nice brown tissue, some bleeding spots. Then the spleen, another organ which is in poor shape, should be nice red and not with those little tiny specks inside. To those black spots here. Could have been maybe already some tuberculosis. I don't know. It's not easy to see at the beginning stage. But the spleen is also unhealthy. And you see a lot of fat, greasy material around this organ. So our conclusion here was that the organs are for many of the platys, too far damaged and that will be difficult to cure. And those are the fish which are frankly going to die. And that's on a group from platy, like those few hundreds here. There's a certain percentage that is going to die anyway because there are organs are too far gone. And usually the problem is due to bad feeding practice at the breeder. And the bad feeding practice can have an impact on the healthy organs and can have a risk of infections like viral and bacterial effects coming in secondary. But the feeding is such an important matter when you're breeding fish that you have really must take care of it. Where you want to create a good aquatic product, the bacterial infections appear. So you can try an antibacterial treatment which might help the fish, which have still some good organs and still have some potential to survive. Maybe a viral effects could play a role, but usually for viruses, unfortunately, we have to send it to the laboratory and wait a few weeks before we get a result. And then you will hear well, a virus you cannot treat. You can also only treat the secondary infectious, like bacterial infections. That's the thing you can do. You can try to slow down viral infections by controlling the health of the fish. With good supplements. And that's all you can do. So maybe the fish had another history that it has been raised in high salinity water. So you can add salt. Many of the plantis coming from Asia are raised in high salinity waters. Why? They grow faster and have better color. And it's the water source they have available in those areas. So those are all things you have to think about. You have to discuss with your breeder or your supplier. For the feeding for this fish, we recommend that you feed at least during three to four weeks with our Dr. Basler Biff or herbal or professional treat. And meanwhile, do not give any other food. Just give this kind of food during three, four weeks. And the fish which have a potential to recover, might recover. So it's worthwhile trying. So these are cases that we study on our Patreon Channel. And that would be very helpful for you that you are able to see all those different cases I present here. And there's many more to come. I already have now 68 cases. So 68 cases might already give you a good idea what kind of problems we have in our aquarium with our aquarium fish or shrimp or pulp fish. Those are all the issues we should try to see and try to understand. When you understand fish diseases, you are more able to prevent and also able to take actions. And of course, to learn how to use a microscope, which is of course a very valuable tool for identifying fish diseases or identifying the problems. Thank you for watching.