Fish, Fish, Fish

I must say, fish become substantially less interesting and more of an overall drag when you have to know about them for a grade. Perhaps if it was more of an ID class than a veterinary class it would be more interesting? I'm already not a huge fan of pathology though, so I'm just really not that interested in learning about the pathology of fish. Good thing this part's over next Friday!

Our professor is a really neat guy who has traveled all over the world doing various fish/pathology related things. He has tons of cool stories and pictures for us as well. He also has an English accent, which makes him fun to listen to, even though I'm not all that interested in the pathology of fish haha.

The one upside to learning about these fish is that we have an associated lab, where we get to anesthetize, exam, collect blood, make a blood smear, and recover tilapia. That was this afternoon, and that was pretty darn cool! Collect blood from a fish you say?! Yes, you can actually collect blood from a fish and veterinarians actually do both antimortem and postmortem! There are 4 different sites that you can collect the blood from: midline behind the anal fin, just ventral to the lateral line, from a sinus in the mouth, and directly from the heart. It's definitely one of the more bizarre things I've done in vet school!

Anesthetizing the fish is pretty simple. You place them in a bucket of water (that is suitable for the fish) and add an anesthetic agent such as clove oil or MS222 and wait for them to "go to sleep" like a dog or cat. You need to be sure that you don't scrape off the mucous layer while you're handling them because you'll take off the epithelium with it and leave them open to infections. You also need to keep them moist (squirt them and their gills with water containing the anesthetic from time to time).

Recovery is pretty simple as well. You place them in another tank of water that is well aerated, and support them and watch them until they begin to wake up. As someone who is intimately familiar with small animal emergency medicine and anesthetic recovery, it was so frustrating and difficult to not be able to give the fish some sort of reversal agent, supplementary oxygen, and emergency drugs. We were advised to kind of "swim" the fish around a bit to stimulate them, but for the most part it was just a waiting game. You first begin to notice their opercula moving (the part that flaps over the gills) as they wake up. Next they'll start moving their pectoral and pelvic fins a bit, and eventually they begin to clumsily start to swim. Once they've fully metabolized out the anesthetic agent, they're back swimming around like normal, as if nothing ever happened!

A lot of people gave their fish names, but we didn't. Not sure if that was a conscious decision on our part, but I don't think it really changed how I saw the fish. Thank you Mr. Tilapia for the educational experience today. And to my future clients, I suppose now if you bring your goldfish to me, I can look at his red and white blood cells and also look for blood-borne parasites!