I am referring to all of the lighter coloured/whitish areas along and above the lateral line which are the gas pockets, easily 25 or so.
Water in the tank was well circulated and aged prior to changes, there was no sign of this prior to death, the skin looked fine near the end, except for an apparent "bagginess" due to the loss of mass and the blackening on the belly which is a normal indicator on puffers that things have gone significantly wrong. One thing that I did notice was that I thought that I saw him spit out a large gas bubble shortly prior to his death, but wasn't quite sure at the time when I saw it.
No, didn't do a necropsy, just the ceremonial flush.
His diet consisted of primarily freeze dried shrimp fortified with vitamins and supplemented by internally raised crays and snails. My feeder tanks are far from pristine, but it is a closed environment. Relative to my other fish he got a much smaller percentage of live feeder foods. One would think that signs of disease (IPs) in my other fish would be showing or seeing signs of parasites in the feeder tanks, if something was present, no?
Water parameters, SG was about 1.04 when this all of this came to light. I had been casually/gradually increasing it over several weeks, A,N & N were all at zero with my weekly water changes being about 50% in the 20 long tank and filtration being about 10X.
Poop, funny that you should ask because I never saw any, I had actually dosed him with PazilPro when I first got him to treat any IPs, but could never get him to ingest anything soaked in meds.
Bit of history, sadly looking back the signs may have started several weeks back when I noticed a change in behaviour that I attributed to a trio of bumblebee gobies that had recently introduced to the tank; he became more reclusive. Back in that time period I had also noticed the BBGs and the F8 rubbing their sides and treated with PazilPro (PP) assuming, but never seeing anything. As a result of this noticed change in behaviour, was under the impression that the three BBGs were picking on the poor little guy, thus I shipped them off.
Some time after getting rid of the BBGs and not seeing a change back in his behaviour, I noticed small white cylindrical worms in the tank, about 2 - 3 mm long that swam in a serpentine motion, about the same time it became apparent that he had a marked increase in respiration.
I was not able to take a decent photo of the worm, was unsure of it, took it around to a few of the LFS without any educated answers. Thus I went to "the net" and posted my question to "someone of knowledge" who recommended that I raise my SG to cure any parasite problems that I may have. It was already at about 1.04 and I bumped it up to about 1.08 over 4 days with a slow trickle each day in steps of about .01. Despite this, I kept seeing more of the free swimming worms as his condition was obviously deteriorating.
Unsatisfied with a lack of results and the further deterioration of health, I pulled him from the tank, did a 2 hour dip in potassium permaginate (pp), in tank water and prepared a 5 gallon pail of aged/matching SG water and rehomed him in that assuming that all external parasites were now taken care of.
Assuming that I was dealing with a parasite and that the PP had nuked anything external on the fish, I next bleached the tank and it's contents and re-set it up over three days and dosed him again with PP, just to be sure anything internal was treated since I had read that it was a relative safe med to use on fish.
Upon transfer back the the sterile tank, it was apparent that he was still deteriorating and nothing so far had been effective with his respirations still being rapid, now no longer eating and with a black belly and losing a significant amount of mass.
mack in his tank, I could see the marked deterioration in his health in the past 72 hours and knew that time was not our friend. Assuming that the two doses of PP and the pp had been effective and that I could safety rule parasites of any type, internal or external and with the rapid respiration cane to the conclusion that it could/must be gill disease and thus started the erythromycin.
48 hours on antibiotics should have produced an improvement in health, sadly, I knew the night before what I was going to have to do the next day and he rapidly surrendered to the clove oil.
