Cory lost an eye

Hello Prof, I need help/advise.

A day or two ago i noticed one of my bronze cories had a little bit of a murky left eye, thought maybe it was nothing, me seeing things

And now, while ogling the inhabitants, i saw that cory of mine swim by, and the left eye looked like it had a small red snail on it, in shock i tried to get a closer look as it swam off, but second look it seemed more like it had a blood filled bubble/blasie or something on the outside of the eye, it seems he lost the eye somehow, the surface of the eye looks milky and broken with red a tiny bead of red protruding from it, the other three bronze cories, 2 albinos and peppered look fine, its just him that has this thing... are there any possible clues or hints as to how i should proceed?

 

the red bead, probably blood or something, is gone now, all that remains is a weird, milky looking eye with a black hole

 

Hi Ferry,

This poor fellow has obviously damaged his eye in some or other way. What has happened is that the eye capsule has been punctured and this will not recover. He will unfortunately loose his eyesight on that eye. This should however heal well without any problems. I do not think that this is an infectious problem because as you say all your other fishes are OK. I would just carry on as normal and his poor old eye should eventually heal.

The cause of this is that he has bashed or hooked his eye in something. You need to take a careful look at your aquarium for any sharp objects, although this is often difficult.

However he should be OK and the other fishes will not be influenced.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

shame, i have been studying his behaviour, seems to be scavaging normally, swimming about, eating well, when i fed them... only difference in behaviour seems to be that he is a bit skittish when near the tank and i try to take a pic, he hid in the cave on my last attempt. probably as i go from the blind side to the visible side and just suddenly appear

i thought to maybe add a few spoons of salt to the tank, just for the disinfectant property perhaps, while the damage heals?

it seems the retina is still there inside whats left of the eye, cause there is a visable black inside the milky punctured sac, poor fish

i'll do an inspection of the tank for any posible sharp pointy edges

 

Why people add salt to their tropical tank I do not know!

If you want to do a salt dosage... take him out the tank, and do the salt bath in another container.

The problem with using salt... yes.. it is an excellent disinfectant etc... but it never leaves your tank... (only diluted through water changes). So when you add salt now, and then next week for the other Cory, and then the following day just in case, and the third day for precautionary measures, you land up with too much salt in your tank.

Certain fish will obviously like slightly salty water... and you would have to add a bit of salt now and then... but generally speaking.... your community tanks don't like it.

 

Okay. So no on the salt idea then. Thanks

 

Hi Zoom,

May I point out the advantages of salt to you. Salt increases the osmotic pressure of the water. Fishes that have a wound loose blood, and serum through open wounds. Their bodies are saltier than the surrounding water because without salt in their bodies biological organisms and particularly animals cannot function. If the water around the fish contains no salt, the gradient of saltiness from the body to the water is great and the fish will tend to loose salt and serum from its body more rapidly. If you put salt in the water, the loss of salt and serum from the fishes body is less.

How does the fish hold back more salt from the food and not release it all into the surrounding water? Well it does this my means of its kidney's which hold back the salt but release the water via the urine. Freshwater fishes kidney's have to work hard to keep this salt balance all the time.

If you have a fish with a wound and it is losing salt via the wound the best thing that you can do is add salt to the water. It also means that you are helping its kidneys to have to work less hard in other words you are allowing the fish to save energy that it would use to retain salt and it can rather use this energy to heal the wound. Thus the addition of salt holds major advantages over and above the mild sterilization properties that it does have.

Then I would definitely not move the fish to a quarantine tank because if you catch him you WILL hurt the eye even more and cause more wounding and fluid loss and the stress also needs to be taken into account as this costs the fish energy. It might die as a result of being moved.

Then the addition of salt up to a heaped tablespoon per 100 litres has very little effect on plants, most tolerate these levels without any problems. If you do water changes, you will remove it with ease. The salt does not stick to anything selectively in the tank and it is by exactly the same process that you actually remove the breakdown products such as nitrate from the tank as well.

So in an instance such as this salt addition is going to be useful there is no doubt about this, but for software fishes I would also not routinely add salt to a tank.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Hi

I can also add that many people say you cannot use salt on loaches and so-called scaleless fish. This is not true. They can tolerate salt. The problem is when you suddenly add a bunch of salt in one go. This will not be tolerated by them. You should slowly increase the salinity for these fishes over a period of 48 hours. Allow the treatment to complete (whatever your reason was for adding the salt), and then slowly decrease salinity by means of water changes.

Regards
Lauré