Today LadyMinion and I took a trip to Colchester again to get worms for Boris and our usual weeky stock of live foods for everyone else from Swallow Aquatics.
Against our better judgement we also popped into another store nearby as we needed vitamin dusting powder for Boris's waxworms & earthworms and Swallow's didn't have any.
This is the same infamous shop that Cookie came from. A shop that we swore we'd never buy fish from again but as we were there we had a look at the fish anyway.
And there, in the same freshwater tank we found Cookie & Martha in all those months ago were two sad little figure eight puffers.
Cloudy, infected eyes, ragged fins and the worst fungal and ich infection I've ever seen on a live fish.
One of them is in better condition than the other, but still very unwell.
Anyway, we once again gave the manager 'some advice' on keeping puffers and he agreed to let us have both of them for free as they'd be dead by tomorrow anyway.
So he bagged them up and we took them home and floated them in our hospital tank then mixed up a bucketful of marine salt solution to bring the SG up to a mild brackish level. A couple of hours of slow acclimatization and they're in the tank.
one of them seems to be enjoying the new more comfortable salinity and is playing in the filter current, but the other is looking very sick indeed, it had lost a lot of colour and spent the first hour being pushed randomly about the tank by the current with little resistance.
Dead fish swimming was the phrase LadyMinion used.
In the last hour, since being in brackish water he's regained control of his boyancy control and a little colour has come back to his skin. I fear that even if he survives he may lose an eye to the infection but it now looks like he has a chance.
Here they are still bagged up.They don't look too bad from a distance...
But a closer look reveals why some people and some shops shouldn't keep puffers if they don't know what they're doing.
We'll keep you posted....
Against our better judgement we also popped into another store nearby as we needed vitamin dusting powder for Boris's waxworms & earthworms and Swallow's didn't have any.
This is the same infamous shop that Cookie came from. A shop that we swore we'd never buy fish from again but as we were there we had a look at the fish anyway.
And there, in the same freshwater tank we found Cookie & Martha in all those months ago were two sad little figure eight puffers.
Cloudy, infected eyes, ragged fins and the worst fungal and ich infection I've ever seen on a live fish.
One of them is in better condition than the other, but still very unwell.
Anyway, we once again gave the manager 'some advice' on keeping puffers and he agreed to let us have both of them for free as they'd be dead by tomorrow anyway.
So he bagged them up and we took them home and floated them in our hospital tank then mixed up a bucketful of marine salt solution to bring the SG up to a mild brackish level. A couple of hours of slow acclimatization and they're in the tank.
one of them seems to be enjoying the new more comfortable salinity and is playing in the filter current, but the other is looking very sick indeed, it had lost a lot of colour and spent the first hour being pushed randomly about the tank by the current with little resistance.
Dead fish swimming was the phrase LadyMinion used.
In the last hour, since being in brackish water he's regained control of his boyancy control and a little colour has come back to his skin. I fear that even if he survives he may lose an eye to the infection but it now looks like he has a chance.
Here they are still bagged up.They don't look too bad from a distance...
But a closer look reveals why some people and some shops shouldn't keep puffers if they don't know what they're doing.
We'll keep you posted....