I'm pretty devastated. My male marble con finally lost his battle with chronic swim bladder issues. A year ago, he jumped out of his tank and ruptured his swim bladder. It took 6 months of TLC to get him back to normal. This past week, he again began to sit on the bottom of the tank. He went downhill very fast, and died on Wednesday night. I was distraught but took him into work immediately to perform a necropsy, even though it was midnight. Fish decompose so quickly that I knew I couldn't wait til morning to find out what had happened.
His swim bladder had a lot of scarring, and was filled with a milky white fluid that microscopically showed tons of white blood cells and bacteria. Perhaps strangest of all, there was a large foreign body in his abdomen, with a sharp edge on it. I don't know what it is but I'm going to submit it for histology. My guess is that it's possibly a piece of bone that built up a big granuloma around it (the body's way of trying to wall it off). The sharp edge was just next to the area of his swim bladder that was newly ruptured. Sigh... poor guy.
Jack was my first cichlid, the one who started it all. Five years old and the little dude who will always have a place in my heart.
RIP Jack.
His swim bladder had a lot of scarring, and was filled with a milky white fluid that microscopically showed tons of white blood cells and bacteria. Perhaps strangest of all, there was a large foreign body in his abdomen, with a sharp edge on it. I don't know what it is but I'm going to submit it for histology. My guess is that it's possibly a piece of bone that built up a big granuloma around it (the body's way of trying to wall it off). The sharp edge was just next to the area of his swim bladder that was newly ruptured. Sigh... poor guy.
Jack was my first cichlid, the one who started it all. Five years old and the little dude who will always have a place in my heart.
RIP Jack.
