Moorish Idol's eye now has 3 bubbles

diannef

Premium Member
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Any suggestions for my poor Moor?
 
Ouch, That is about the worst case of exopthalmus I've ever seen. I'm afraid that at the very least, that fish will lose its eye. The first thing to do is to try and determine the cause. There are two basic causes of "free bubble" exopthalmia: supersaturation (usually affects both eyes, and usually is seen in more than one fish). Or it could be from mechanical damage. Was this fish captured in a net recently, jumped out of the tank, or otherwise get some trauma to the eye?

People often cite bacterial infections as a source of exopthalimia - but that is actually fairly rare. In those cases, both eyes are usually infected, there is often signs of inflammation, and the eyes protrude as if something is pushing from behind, not showing bubbles right under the eye tissue like in your moorish idol.

I've never been successful treating a fish with an eye that bad, and there really is not any practical treatment that a home aquarist can undertake. The two choices are to use MS-222 to knock the fish out and then draw the gas off with a syringe (but the bubbles will almost always come back) or to use a pressure chamber to reduce the bubble size and allow the bubbles to go back into solution in the bloodstream (but that won't work on bubbles this large).

Sorry.....

Jay
 
Not being sure whether it was gas bubble disease or an injury, I fed him peas and turned off skimmer and all pumps except the sump. Continued to worsen for the next 2 days--additional bubbles and larger main bubble. By 3rd day, the bubbles started to go down. I turned the skimmer and extra pumps on one at a time. Seeing to adverse changes, left them on.

Happy to report, the bubbles slowly disappeared, and he is back to his usual perky self! He's lucky to have kept his eye.
 
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