Gerald Bassleer documents surgery on an Ancistrus catfish with a large growth behind its eye. He removed the mass under anesthetic with a razor blade and treated the wound with Isobetadine ointment, but it returned after 40 days. The cause remained unknown.
Questions this video answers
Case #89, Ancistrus (ornamental catfish).
April 20, 2023.
NarcoMore Plus (Aquarium Winster).
Manual excision using a razor blade after anesthetizing the fish.
Isobetadine ointment applied twice a day for one week.
Chapters
Dear fish lover, today, with a background of sandbank at the Amazon, at the Amazon river direction from Manaus to Barcelos was one of my trips. I even have here a shirt from an aquarium hobbyist association from Natal. So some parts I'm partly involved with Brazil and the original fish. So today I will also talk about a Brazilian fish, a Brazilian fish which came from, I don't know, maybe it came from a breeder, maybe it comes from the wild. But it was presented to me by a hobbyist. So with this background, talking about an ancestry species and therefore I will show my PowerPoint so I can share with you that an ancestry had a big swelling or a big growth, something which is very unusual here today in our case 89, this is how it looked like. We see this sometimes reported in social media, that crazy growth appear on certain fish. And here it was on an assistance just behind the eye. And it was asked to me, Gerald, what can I do about it? Well, the thing I can recommend to do, the first thing you can do is well, try to remove it. See here it was removed and it was treated. And they used for this particular method, which I explained later on. And this was the material that was collected. It was kind of necrotic tissue. I didn't have the microscope with me because this was presented to me online. But anyway, I wanted to share with you this case and I asked the people why, if you want to remove a big growth on a fish like here, on these ancestors, you can use a tranquilizer like Narcomore plus from Aquarium Winster. It gives you the directions how you can put a fish asleep and then you can use a razor blade just to cut off the growth. This was done in this case because it's not a real surgical practice. But anyway, you can try to do something in a case like this. You can disinfect the wound with an ointment like isobetadine. Isobetadine is very safe to use on a wound. When a fish has a wound or a big damage. This is a very good way of putting some ointment on a wound of a fish. You can do that two times a day during one week. And that might disinfect wounds of fish. So you can also use it for other fish which has aggression or bite wounds, or transport bites, or transport wounds. I mean, you can use isobetadin as an ointment, as a treatment. You can feed endophiz also with a biofish food professional treat and herbal just to help the fish, maybe to treat the problem. Because the problem is what is the origin of it? Is it coming from a virus? Is it coming from a cancer? Growth from food, from any other kind of, well, natural cause? We didn't know because it was hard to examine. If you have something like this, we cannot exclude a viral infection. Only a laboratory can confirm. So we did this and the people reported to me when I had a phase that after 14 days, well, again, the origin of the problem. Sorry, you just have this last line here. Could be a virus, could be food. Yes. Hard to define, hard to find out. But after 40 days, again, the growth was back again on, on that fish. So it came back. So it's coming from inside the fish. And then you might have to really do some surgery and pulling out what is inside the fish. But I'm afraid that you would kill the fish and damage it so badly you might try to do it again, cutting it off and see what happens. So, but. Or maybe the fish can live with it for a long time. It's usually not infectious and not causing a problem to the other fish. It's something which is locally on bad fish and maybe it came already from the wild, who knows? So this was a special case I wanted to share with you, which is very unusual. I just want to report things I find and maybe you also find and you can report back to me how you did it, how you handled it. And we all can learn from that. When you reply in the comments on my YouTube channel or in my Patreon. We all learn. We know certain things, but as you know, we know that much and so much more. We have to learn more and more. Keep on learning and then you will get advanced somewhere. Thank you.
