Crazy!  Surgeries on FISH.  That’s right – FISH.  It don’t get much crazier than that.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this internship, it’s that you never stop learning.  There’s always some new technique and some new species you’ve never worked with.  I love that about Veterinary Medicine and I can’t wait to get into it.

So here’s the awesome things I’ve been working with recently!  We’ve been treating one of the aquarium’s Pacific Creole Fish for quite some time now.  A recurring infection has led to repeated incidents where gas accumulate behind the fish’s eye and it sort of pops out.  Not out out, but sticking out there a little more than normal.  So we removed it.  

Fish anesthesia is accomplished by dissolving the anesthetic agent (MS-222) in water, placing the fish in it and waiting for it to go under.  The tricky part is keeping it breathing while you do the procedure.  Surgery has to take place out of the water because the loss of body fluids would kill the fish if it were submerged.  A pump brings water from the bucket the fish was put under in through a tube into its mouth where it flows over the gills keeping the fish asleep and breathing. 

Once the Creole Fish’s eye was out, Dr. Adams sealed the associated blood vessels with his hemostat and placed a thick skin protectant cream in the socket.   We examined the eye and it turns out the poor thing definitely couldn’t see out of it anyway.  Tissues were loose all over the place in there.  So he’s doing much better now.  We’ve got him on antibiotics and he’s healing nicely.

Fishie number two is the Ballonfish!  These things are sweet.  Dr. Adams was notified of a growth under the fish’s mouth last week so we went to check it out.  As we were examining, the little guy went from this:

To this!   

I had never seen one blow up before.  It’s so cool!  They suck a lot of water into their stomach and slowly fill up (it takes like 10 seconds when they decide to do it).  Lance told me how when he worked at a pet shop back in the day they would feed them guppies and then harass them till they puffed up.  Then you could hold them up to the light and see the guppies swimming around in the porcupine fish bowls!

Anyway…this week we removed that mass.  Same anesthetic procedure as above, only this time we had to use more invasive surgery tools because the mass clearly went into the tissue below.  Lance removed it and then sutured it up.  Apparently because most fish skin is so thin, they don’t respond to sutures well and usually end up tearing them out just by moving.  But Balloonfish are different.  Their skin is thicker and they do quite well.  We gave him some antibiotics and now he’s swimming around doing just great.

So now here comes the biggie.  We examined a Striped Sea Bass.  Now these things are big.  Like rrrrreal big.  I don’t know who this dude is, but I found this picture because I just want you to understand what I mean when I say rrrrreal big.

For a couple weeks he’s been hiding at the top of Blue Cavern (the Aquarium of the Pacific’s three story tank!) with clear respiratory distress.  So the aquarists pulled him out and we sedated him (we used a whole lot of triple 2!).  He’s got little bites all over his body cause the other fish were picking on him.  We looked at the gills and there were little nodules on them.  We took a sample and sent it in, but when we looked at it, it just looked like mucus.  His head is really big.  Bigger than normal.  And because of that it seems that his operculum (the bony covering that protects the gills) is just too big.  So we’re waiting for results or for him to grow into his head.  Either way he’s isolated from the bullies that were a quarter his size and getting all the food he can eat, so things are looking up for him.

Dr. Adams has taken me through several exit exams as well.  When new fish arrive they are put on quarantine and go through a series of different treatments to relieve them of any ailments they may have brought with them and to protect the other fish they will be living with.  We do skin scrapes and gill biopsies and look at them under the microscope to look for any nasty parasites that might have made it through the treatments.  But so far everything has passed wonderfully.

And we’ve done a bunch of treatments on various species of fish so I’ve included pictures for you cause everybody loves pictures!