Fish disease case nr. 69 Cichlid Pseudocrenilabres with bacterial infection and tubercels

Dear A case on cichlids is always interesting to discuss because there's many people are keeping cichlids. Cichlid lovers are worldwide. For South American cichlids or Central American cichlids or African cichlids, that's something which has created a lot of groups and hobbies into the world. And that's why I encounter quite often cichlids problems which are presented to me in the industry. And today it's about African cichlid, the pseudo crane labris. And I share you my PowerPoint so I can show you what the problem we found in this cichlid, scientific name Pseudocranilabris multicolor. A fish that has been wasting away. And most likely we suspect it's fish tuberculosis. Here we see the fish in the fish tank. You see the poor condition this cichlid is in. You see the color change. You see the damaged finch. You see the fish will die within the next hours. And the other ones you see, well, quite healthy swimming around, not showing, not showing yet any particular lesions or damage. But every few weeks there is one dying away and waiting away very slowly. Gradually the fish are dying one after another, but can take a longer time. Here we see the detail of the fish in a plastic cup. You see a little bit raised scales. You see the heavy respiration. You see the poor condition of this fish. And that's the fish we examined today with our microscopic observation. And the first thing we noticed nothing particularly on the skin, but particularly the gills. They were very badly infected with bacteria. See, they're completely parts and pieces are missing of the gill tissue. Different gill arches are badly damaged. So you can imagine that fish as a respiratory problem. It's like pneumonia. I call that branch pneumonia. In many of my books or my presentations I give, when I give lectures. It's like a lung disease by humans. Pneumonia, you know, that's killing well. That's why the fish eventually will die. But we found internally maybe the origin of the weakness of the fish, why the fish was wasting away. That we seen a lot of tubercles in the mesenteria next to the gut lining. Here we see quite a few more tubercles. You see in the spleen, we see all those melanomacrophage centers, all those dark black specks taken away healthy tissue. Usually we send this to the laboratory. We found bacteria inside those kind of centers and. But you see not much healthy tissue is left in the spleen. And the same for the liver. You can see here all the specks inside Taken away healthy tissue. So the organs of the fish are in very bad shape. That's why the fish is of course, wasting away, not being healthy enough, not good enough to eat good food, to be competitive with other fish. So the fish will slowly die, get secondary bacterial infections in the gills. And that's all what we suspect that has been happening. And the fish that are really bad, well, you cannot save them, you know. And some fish can carry this fish, tuberculosis, which is called mycobacterium, for a long time, even a lifetime. They can survive with it in limited quantities. It's very common in nature, this kind of mycobacterium. It's a natural bacteria, but in breeding facilities it can become a nasty problem because it can accumulate in the organs also by certain feeding practices, certain poor hygienic standards. That means dirty water, bad filtration, overcrowding. This also can have a larger impact on the quality of the fish. The secondary bacterial infection, like we see in the girls, we can try to control. At least we can try with an antibacterial treatment that you can get in the shop, or you can ask your vet or fish doctor for oxytocit recycler or minocycline, which can help in this case to control the bacterial infection. Maybe some ferrotodone can help, maybe some neomycin. Hard to say, because a lab diagnosis of the bacteria microbiological culture can help you to identify by sensitivity testing. But that takes time, days. But for a breeder, it's very important to do that because a breeder can find out his problems and can intervene and can take proper actions to create a better and healthier fish stock. Improve the feeding program for these kind of fish, like dwarf cichlids or this African cichlid. Avoid feeding with food that carry Mycobacterium, like mosquito larvae, live or frozen. They carry quite often mycobacteria infection, not all of them, depending on the source and the handling of the mosquito larvae. We recommend to help the fish that you feed a guaranteed safe granulated fish food like our Dr. Basel biofish food, Fuko fuqua, helps against bacterial internal infections, helps the fish to recover or our professional treat and feed no other food during that couple of weeks of feeding with our specific feed. So that's a specific case that I present on my Patreon and that can help you to overcome and to understand why cat cichlids can have a problem. Or certain fish, particularly dwarf cichlids, African or South American. I have some cases on South America that show also the same problem. And it's usually the origin of the fish, the breeding of the fish and the way the fish have been fed and the way the fish have been kept. So those are all conditions which can bring on diseases instead of treating, we can think about preventing. And that's taking the good measures which I recommend in my books and in my leisures, in my presentations and in these presentations like here today. Thank you for watching.