All in a Days Work

WARNING: Not for the squeamish!

In case some of you are wondering what it is I do in Seahorse Land a majority of my time is taken up by dealing with sick fish (yes, seahorses are fish).  One particular species, Hippocampus erectus, the lined seahorse has been having some pouch issues.  This is only in the males because the females do not have pouches and in case you are wondering why the males do, it is because they have the babies.

What issues you ask???  Well the pouches are sometimes susceptible to bacterial infections and gas saturation problems leading them to have buoyancy issues...basically, they get infections and they start swimming upside down and at the surface.  Obviously we cannot have this so what do we do to prevent it??  We have to flush the pouches with an anti-biotic to treat the infection.  This works some of the time, but not all of the time.  Sometimes these gas saturation problems can lead to external bubbles (literally bubbles on the skin) and with that we have to treat it differently.  How often??  These fish get flushed everyday for 14 days and are then re-evaluated.

Do all of these fish survive??  I wish.  The hardest part of this job so far is having to handle the fact that a majority of these fish that are having pouch issues are probably going to die.  We have been losing about one a day and even though some are looking better, others are starting to show otherwise.  One fish was sent out to a lab for further work and it was found that it had systemic uronema...basically it has parasites and bacteria that are leading to these mortalities and our head vet does not think this is completely fixable.

What do you do if they die???  We do not have a large vet staff here and because of the frequency of morts (deaths) that we get in Seahorse Land we do our own necropsies (animal autopsies) to try and figure out what caused their death.  In the case of these males we already know what is causing it, but we need to make sure there are no other problems such as parasites.  So we have to take the dead fish to the Diagnostics Lab and cut it open.  Before any cutting starts though we get skin scrape samples to look for any parasites and then take a clip of the gills for the same reason.

H. erectus with enlarged liver

Liver removed, gall bladder is sm. dk. spot

Once the animal is cut open we take a sample of the liver and take note of the size/color and also make not of any other organs such as the gall bladder, swim bladder, gonads, etc...Seahorses have a very simple digestive tract and not much of a stomach so we don't look there very often.  After looking at the samples underneath the microscope we write down what we saw (parasites present or not) and file the form away in that particular species.

What other issues are there?  Well so far I've only been dealing with these pouch flushes and external bubbles which require injections of two different medications.  Outside of these problems though I have seen some skin lesions but not too much else.  Although we just had one poor seahorse with a major skin lesion on its tail that was down to the bone and some worms, already in the exhibit infested themselves inside this seahorses tail.  Thankfully I was not there to see this but unfortunately we lost that fish this morning.

These are the downsides of what I do but in all fairness it's not a bad part of my job.  To me it is a great learning experience and because I'm still new to these fish I like getting the opportunities to do my own necropsies and gain that hands-on experience.