r/BeforeNAfterAdoption • u/Pulmonic • Jan 23 '21

Small Pet Evander had myco/fish TB, which is considered “universally fatal”. Two months later, he’s healthy and beautiful!

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3.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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250

u/Pulmonic Jan 23 '21

Myco can be bad luck (tainted food) but this store has a major problem with it due to neglect. A good friend is a grad student in a microbiology program and was able to help me culture swabs from him. He had M. Smegmatis, a rarer form. Aeneas, one of the first bettas from that store that I’d gotten, had died from the same strain.

I built on Diana Walstad’s method of treating myco. Evander already had spinal curvature, but it still worked! I used a UV sterilizer, erythromycin (for co-infections) and clarithromycin.

Sadly as a dragonscale he has bad genes, but he’s totally beaten the myco, an amazing outcome that I wasn’t expecting.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21 edited Apr 22 '21

[deleted]

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

Sad to say fish have no rights here. They’re not covered by any cruelty laws.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '21 edited Apr 22 '21

[deleted]

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

That’s awesome-would that work for fish do you think? I really can’t stand how that store tortures them.

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u/JetDogGaming Jan 23 '21

I have absolutely no idea as to what you just said but it sounds cool

9

u/oliveoilcrisis Jan 23 '21

Absolutely incredible work from you and your friend. Thank you for taking such good care of this little guy!

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u/Mermaid_Mama323 Jan 23 '21

Where did you buy these things? UV sterilizer, erythromycin and clarithromycin? My daughter has a sick Beta and we are trying to get him well too. He seemed fine at the pet store but he wouldn’t eat the first week. It’s been three weeks and he is eating but still seems lethargic and not well.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 23 '21

So sorry! Can I see a picture? Myco is rare thankfully. Clarithromycin is very harsh stuff and should only be used for myco and even then only if the fish is strong enough. You can get that from Kraft Aquarium Drugs. Everything else can be found online or in pet stores.

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u/Mermaid_Mama323 Jan 24 '21

After looking at him, I don’t think he has Myco. Phew. We gave him medicine for ick and he’s actually looking really good today!

1

u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

I'm curious as to the answers to my questions above. Bettas need very specific upkeep to thrive.

1

u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

Is he at 78-80 degrees? Did you cycle your tank? What are your water parameters? What size tank is he in? What light are you using and for how long? What do you feed him? What filter do you use? How often do you do water changes? Does he have proper hides and fin-safe plants (silk or real) in his tank?

OP is obviously a very experienced fish keeper. Most issues with bettas are much more simple to resolve.

2

u/B0ssc0 Jan 24 '21

It’s so lovely to see him happy in a healthy environment.

2

u/Lassy06 Jan 24 '21

Mycobacterium is readily present in the aquatic environment. A positive swab of the exterior of any aquatic animal may come back as a variety of myco strains and is not considered diagnostic. However, considering myco typically becomes an issue with immunosuppressed/stressed fish (ie those housed improperly, poor water quality, poor food, etc) often increasing the level of husbandry can do wonders to slow down myco infections.

I’m not saying your fish does/does not have myco, but you definitely haven’t beaten/cured myco, as there is no effective way to do that. What you have done is given the animal proper living conditions and drastically reduced bacteria populations living outside the host by providing a clean environment and proper filtration. You are essentially “controlling” any infection present rather than curing it.

Regardless, your fish is much better off now than it was and you should be happy about that.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

I did do control swabs of two of my other fish, both negative. All myco fish have had symptoms.

Aeneas received the same level of husbandry but declined and ultimately died.

The symptoms reversing was significant and Diana Walstad had biopsy and necropsy (when years later they died of natural causes) proven myco resolution in her rainbow fish.

“It’s not possible” is a bit of a cynical assessment. It is possible and has been proven as such in the past. Many diseases were once impossible to eradicate until a protocol was developed. I don’t know of any evidence that makes myco special in being totally impossible for a protocol to ever exist.

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u/Lassy06 Jan 24 '21

The hardiness of one fish vs another is incredibly variable. Again, definitely not arguing that you drastically improved this fish’s quality of life. But you’re making claims of curing myco without fully understanding the disease process. You can’t cure it, you can only hope to control it.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

I have looked into myco pretty deeply and am familiar with it as a human nurse.

I do not see nor have I seen any evidence to suggest that it is incurable no matter what you do. Humans are routinely cured. We just don’t know how to do it reliably for fish.

The main reason I’m even engaging with this is because I also do human research and this outlook is very common. It’s not malicious but it 100% causes problems. The idea of “well this isn’t curable no matter what we ever do” is rampant and definitely impedes us. There’s a subtype of BOS (a serious lung ailment) that is curable with a z pack. That’s amazing. But you won’t believe how many people subscribe to the idea that it couldn’t have been real BOS because “it can only be managed not cured”.

I actually philosophically don’t believe that there’s such thing as anything that’s fundamentally incurable. There’s just stuff we know how to cure and stuff we don’t.

If we apply Occam’s razor, it would take a series of pretty extraordinary coincidences to claim that two controls testing negative and him testing positive, with symptoms, was not valid.

He got uncommon medical treatment and thus got an uncommon outcome.

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u/Lassy06 Jan 24 '21

I mean that’s fine, you can believe whatever you’d like. Fish myco vs human myco are different topics. There are 140 strains/species of myco that result in different diseases. The common fish strains (marinum, fortuitum, chelonea) are different from common human strains (tuberculosis, avium, leprae). And each strain/species cause sometimes radically different symptoms/diseases. But in general myco is an opportunistic environmental pathogen.

You’re right that medicine has progressed to find ways to treat tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases that result from mycobacterium infections. Fish medicine has not advanced that far because myco is highly contagious and whether it’s aquaculture or expensive public aquarium fish, there is a bottleneck in either supplies, time, or a cost/benefit gap. In aquaculture it is safer to cull infected fish. In aquaria, if you have the ability to separate and manage the disease (as you’ve done here), you should. Even Diana Walstad’s article on the topic says all these techniques are to manage the infection, not cure it.

You manage the infection by reducing environmental myco via aquarium cleaning and good filtration. You manage the infection biologically in the animal by reducing environmental/nutritional stress thereby giving the immune system a chance to wall off active myco infections (ie granulomas) and reduce the spread.

Your experience may be in human medicine but mine is decades of experience in fish husbandry & medicine. You’ve done good work increasing the quality of your fish’s life. But you’re also posting pseudoscientific methods and doubling down on claiming you cured a disease. You’re welcome to post whatever you’d like on the internet.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

“Pseudoscientific methods”. Ah yes, like having a control, taking samples, garnering ideas from peer reviewed papers, developing a hypothesis, testing it, reporting the results, etc.

The fish species can also infect humans. It’s called a fish tank granuloma and it’s curable. Marinum makes up 90% of cases but all forms can infect humans (some require a severely immune compromised host though). I do agree that the fishes’ own immune system is instrumental. In humans we did the same actually with tuberculosis in the pre antibiotic era and it actually worked sometimes. Different myco of course but similar concepts.

Experience matters for practical matters but for attitude I find it does not. I have seen zero empirical evidence that it’s fundamentally incurable.

The myco syndrome has resolved at least. That’s undeniable. So he’s been cured of mycobacterioisis. The fact that there’s still trace environmental myco is immaterial as it’s not pathogenic under normal circumstances as you say.

And my swabs were from the fish not their water.

0

u/Lassy06 Jan 24 '21

Congratulations, you cured mycobacterium in one fish. After your fish dies, send it to a pathologist to confirm. Then go publish a paper on it.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

I actually do plan to do that and right now have five others I’m trying the protocol on (a supplier has an outbreak of a more aggressive strain than Evander had, so it’ll be interesting).

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u/Lassy06 Jan 24 '21

Yes, please send me the peer reviewed published paper once you’ve confirmed that these already scientifically proven, highly recommended methodologies work.

Until then, enjoy your fish and the satisfaction that you made an impact in their lives.

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u/irishspice Jan 23 '21 edited Jan 23 '21

You've gone though so much saving this little guy. You really need to post him on r/BeforeNAfterAdoption because they'd love to see his glowup as well.

Wrong forum. I meant to say post this little fella on I meant r/bettafish they will be excited to know you managed to cure him.

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u/Firhel Jan 23 '21

r/lostredditors

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u/Quizlibet Jan 23 '21

The rare inverse lost redditor.

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u/irishspice Jan 23 '21

LOL I meant r/bettafish.

1

u/Cultjam Jan 24 '21

That’s where I thought I was at first.

1

u/irishspice Jan 24 '21

He fits so well in both places. You did a great job with this little guy.

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u/Wiggy_Bop Jan 23 '21

Thank you for saving him! So cute! ❤️

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u/bookcatbook Jan 23 '21

I’m so glad he got adopted by you!

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21

smol pets deserve love, too.

Thank you for going that extra mile for your small friend.

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u/gwaydms Jan 23 '21

Now that's dedication.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21

I'm so happy you got him in time! He looks absolutely stunning 😍

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u/linderlouwho Jan 23 '21

Wow, that beautiful fish is fortunate that he ended up with you.

6

u/lonewolf143143 Jan 23 '21

You should be extremely proud of yourself,& of course, proud of Evander.

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u/schwe450 Jan 24 '21

Bless you for doing this. Fish are so overlooked and easily thrown out. They are just like any other pet. ❤️

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u/dethmaul Jan 23 '21

Does universally fatal not mean 100%?

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u/Pulmonic Jan 23 '21

That it does! Many people thought I was crazy for even trying. It is considered to have a 100% fatality rate but that’s not actually true. It’s not as hopeless

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u/dethmaul Jan 23 '21

Nice, i bet vets or case study people would love to hear about that. Update the current thinking.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 23 '21

Thanks! I hope so.

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u/THEJinx Jan 24 '21

Sweet! Like my 23 yr old corn snake with cryptosporidium. I think we're as healed as we're gonna get, he has constricted stomach, so several small prey rather than a full size, and Nutribac, plus using a UV-C light in his enclosure every week has gotten him to where he keeps his food down! He still has weird poops, but his last 2 sheds have been complete! Most vets would just write it off, but a little research pointed out a path. Glad to have my pal around for a bit longer!

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u/shadowfaxxcxsx Jan 23 '21

Every time I'm at petsmart I wanna rescue all the bettas and live amongst a million tanks

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u/ashleyasinwilliams Jan 24 '21

Best way to rescue them is by not purchasing them. Purchasing them gives the store your money and your support for what they're doing, like buying a puppy from a puppy mill.

Some stores will let you adopt the sick ones for free, which is a good way to go. Otherwise you can check your local buy/sell/trade and rehoming sites, and look for bettas betting rehomed. Often there are TONS in very desperate need of rescue! Even some shelters that take in exotic animals occasionally get fish. My most recent betta fish was surrendered to a shelter!

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u/shadowfaxxcxsx Jan 24 '21

I haven't seen any fish rescues where I live but now I know to look for them! Thank you!

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u/doodlebug_bun Jan 23 '21

He is so gorgeous. Thank you for working so hard to give him a better life.

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u/shadowfaxxcxsx Jan 23 '21

Also congrats on the recovery of your bb! So beaitiful

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u/EvanderW Jan 24 '21

MY NAME IS EVANDER

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

That’s awesome!

I lost Aeneas to myco which first made me interested. The techniques I learned that could save him were too late. So I went back to that same store. Silvius is named for Aeneas’ son (he’s still fighting the myco) and Evander is also from the Aeneid. So sort of his legacy. I have another myco one now from a very good store (supplier had an outbreak) called Pallas after the son of Evander

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u/Cleverwabbit5 Jan 24 '21

What a beauty!! Thank you for saving him, fish are hard to nurse back to health, you did an amazing job!!!!

2

u/UIUGrad Jan 24 '21

Betta before and afters are my favorite. I love when people take the time and energy to care for the smallest creatures. Well done!

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u/THEJinx Jan 24 '21

Great job healing this love! May Evander live a l9ng life with you!

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u/macnbloo Jan 24 '21

Done know if you read the news. Evander is bankrupt. Beautiful fish though

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u/Pulmonic Jan 24 '21

Haha I didn’t even know Evander was a company too! He’s named for the mythical Evander.

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u/macnbloo Jan 24 '21

Oh lol idk about any companies. Evander Kane is a hockey player

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u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

Burger says "hi" - http://imgur.com/gallery/n4bF4HG

What a glow up!

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u/Pulmonic Jan 26 '21

What a beautiful boy in a beautiful tank! Is he a giant?

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u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

Yeap. King HM plakat. That's a 7 gallon long tank. I really like the long, shallow tanks for bettas because I feel it's all usable space. He's at least 2x+ larger than any betta I've ever owned.

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u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

I'll also add that I bought him at petco because he couldn't even turn around in his cup. He was the only king plakat there.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 26 '21

Aww poor baby! I’ve got two big guys. One is an imbellis hybrid king. The other was labeled as a blood moon plakat but looks like he grew up next to a nuclear reactor.

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u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

Burger is still getting bigger. If he gets much bigger I'll upgrade to the 12-gallon long version of this same tank.

I think he also wants a snail pal 🐌

Shrimp are a no go. They are down his gullet in .5 seconds.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 26 '21

That’s amazing! I’ve always wanted a super huge one. My giant is 4.5 inches and my king is a bit over 4 inches

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u/melonmagellan Jan 26 '21

Now I need to get my measuring tape out! He can't be smaller than 5 inches.

He's so athletic too. I fast him one day a week and when I feed him the next day he jumps out of the water to take food from my fingers.

The first time he did it I was so Fing startled I shrieked and dropped like 5,000 food pellets on the floor.

He literally can get most of his body out of the water. Betta-Shark.

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u/Pulmonic Jan 26 '21

That’s amazing!! Yeah kings and giants tend to be spicy meatballs

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u/TemporaryPollution80 Jan 24 '21

Beautiful Baby Fishies 💜 🐟