Luca’s Mouth Issue

Luca’s Mouth Issue

My poor little Luca seems to be having a health issue.  On Monday I noticed that his mouth tissue looks frayed as if it’s deteriorating.  See how it appears sort of “frilly” looking?  Well normally it would be perfectly smooth with no odd flaps or frills.  It seemingly happened overnight and at first I wasn’t sure if it was some sort of pathogen or if it was an injury, possibly from the plastic plant I had in the tank.  But it seems too uniform all around the mouth to be an injury from that.

Thankfully it doesn’t seem to bother him at all; he’s still behaving just like normal.  But I needed to do something to try and stop the deterioration (if that is indeed what’s going on here) and get it to start healing.  So today I set up the quarantine tub and gave Luca a 5 minute salt dip/bath in a 3% salt solution.  Salt dips are always nerve-wracking for me because the fish tip over to their side and just generally act agitated during the dip.  But he actually handled it really well, and was back to his normal antics pretty much right away after the dip was over!  I think he’s a strong little fish… remember, this is a fish that survived that 5-day shipping ordeal!  I’m going to evaluate him tomorrow and probably do another salt dip.  Hopefully a few salt dips and daily 90% water changes in quarantine will be enough to resolve this.  It doesn’t seem like an infection since it’s not red or swollen, but maybe it’s just the very beginning of an infection so it’s not red yet.  But anyway, just in case I went ahead and ordered both MetroMeds and MediGold today from Goldfish Connection. 

I’ve been meaning to make a salt dip how-to video for quite some time, so since I actually needed to do a salt dip today, I figured I’d finally get around to making the how-to video for it.  Here it is!

2 Comments

  • Auroran Lauriel Posted February 12, 2023 12:30 pm

    So, do have any further thoughts on what could have been the problem?

  • Jennie Posted February 17, 2023 4:22 pm

    No idea! It bothers me not knowing what the problem was, but mostly I’m just glad it’s better now. 🙂

Add Comment

Leave a Reply to Auroran Lauriel Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *