steve wrote:Yikes! Collect a few and bring it to a vet. It could be a parasite and knowing the kind you have to deal with is important when figuring out the medication. Any idea how she could have gotten it?
Rizvan wrote:looks like the same parasites my brothers guppies had poo'd out as well.. Blyah, its disgusting...
Have you been feeding your turtle fish?
tringlee55 wrote:steve wrote:Yikes! Collect a few and bring it to a vet. It could be a parasite and knowing the kind you have to deal with is important when figuring out the medication. Any idea how she could have gotten it?Rizvan wrote:looks like the same parasites my brothers guppies had poo'd out as well.. Blyah, its disgusting...
Have you been feeding your turtle fish?
I have been looking at some images of similar white strings like that, and it seems to be a parasite, specifically tapeworms (cestoda).
I took a sample of it (another sample of stool too) for the veterinary to analyze it. The problem was that I took it out of the water using one of those green fish nets, so when I tried to take it off the net I wasn't able to do it without breaking it in a lot of small pieces, which eventually ended up joining together, conforming a chunk without a particular shape, so it didn't look like a worm anymore.
When I showed the pictures I posted above to the vet she immediately said that it was clearly a parasite, but after seeing the chunk in the tube she began to hesitate, she says that these worms do not break so easily, and maybe it would be another thing, like intestinal mucus secretion. Then she observed it with the microscope and said that it doesn't look like a worm, because it didn't have the body rings or head or tail, she was just seeing a mucus-like dough. However, when she observed the stool she found one (and only one) nematode egg...
Before going to the vet I consulted some webpages to be sure they were not going to give her some toxic medication (they are specialized on exotics but you never know), I took as reference this table: http://www.austinsturtlepage.com/Care/medications.htm
According to that, Ivermectin and Levamisole should be avoided. Well, surprisingly she was going to give her a Levamisole shot, I told her that I'd prefer a safer medication and she gave her Panacur orally. She used a metallic catheter to introduce the liquid directly to the stomach, I don't know if this is the normal procedure, but it was really really dramatic the way she had to pull her head out of the shell... I thought she was going to break her neck or something, really painful to see.
In any case, my concern now is that maybe the worm that she defecated is not the same that they found on the stool so the medication could be doing nothing... or even the egg she saw was a cestoda and not a nematode, in which case the medication would do nothing either... the truth is that I don't really trust them too much after realizing that they were going to give her a toxic medication... and even anticipating which medication they were going to use before knowing which parasite was.
EDIT: Sorry, I forgot to answer your question about the food. What’s ‘funny’ about this is that they are probably the indirect responsibles about this situation, I took my turtle to them a month ago to a regular check, and they advised me to give her fish (not live, just fish from the fish market). A week after following their advice my turtle began to eat less and look like sick, of course, the cause was the fish, I was giving it fresh, without previous freezing, so she probably got the parasites this way, they didn’t tell me that I had to freeze it first, and now, today in the visit when I told them the cause they said “oh! of course you have to freeze it first”, well, they didn’t tell me to do it…
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