Tumor on Whiptail???? (pic)

[CatBrat]

My female Crocodile Whiptail (Anyone no which sp. it could be?) has grown what I think is a toumor on its pectoral fin. It seems to have lots of small red veins running into it, which makes me think it's 'feeding' off the fish. It has only taken around 2-3 weeks to get to this size. Is there anything that I can do? Does anyone know what may have caused it (It was in my tank which broke and the fish were left with absolutly no water for an unknowen amount of time, could this have triggered it?)?

Heres a picture....

Thanks for any help,

Cheers, CatBrat.

[HummingBird]

I've emailed your pic to some Vet Pathologists (my dad works with them) they should be able to tell fairly certainly what it is (they do this stuff for a living so you'd hope they would.)

[caserole]

That looks nasty catbrat

this whiptail cat is one of tho's difficult fish to be sure of. they are also known as lancer whiptail :- either Hemiloricaria lanceolata or Hemiloricria cf. lanceolata .

they are still in the shops here in wellington so if it does not look good for it hopefully you should beable to find one in auckland too.

[Ira]

Yeah, that definitely looks like a tumor. I suspect chemotherapy may be a bit too expensive for a fish.

It's possible the stress of the broken tank incident could have weakened the fish's immune system enough to allow some virus to take hold that caused the cancer or it could have been the fish's immune system was holding off a cancer it already had and then it took advantage of the stress to take over.

Only treatment I can imagine might be practical is take it out of the tank and see if you can cut the tumor off with a very sharp(Sterilized) knife and then put it in a hospital tank with melafix and some salt. Or something along those lines. You'd want to make sure you get all of the tumor so you'll probably have to take off a bit of the fin too.

Don't go and start chopping up your fish straight away though, maybe someone else will come up with a better idea.

[HummingBird]

Here's what my dad said:

I had a chat with Alice about it. She feels it's probably a benign tumour since it's well demarkated. ie not spreading underneath the skin. She might ask Cathy about it since Cathy does more with zoo animals and fishes. Alice said that the zoo vets would do surgery like that. They'd just put some anesthetic in the water and "lop it off". How long has it taken to grow to that size is a question that could answer a lot as well. Obviously if it's very rapid growing then good night ladies. The concern with it is of course that it's going to unbalance it and possibly get bumped and injured and lead to other problems. So if it's a valuable fish it could be worthwhile looking into getting it removed.

[plecs]

let us know how it goes catbrat!

plecs

[CatBrat]

Thanks a lot for all your help and suggestions

Well I got home on Sunday morning, all ready to cut the tumor off, but when I found the Whiptail the tumor was gone, lol . It must have fallen off at some stage, but I couldn't find it anywhere in the tank. I will keep an eye on it to make sure that it doesn't come back, but since it came off the fish has been a lot more active and feeding well.

Will update you later.....

Cheers, CatBrat.

[Phillz]

Great news.....lucky fish