Sedating, Force Feeding, Injections and CPR for Seahorses
Written By: Tami Weiss | Date Posted: February 20, 2004 | 4 Comments »Sedating
Sedating is the first step to many procedures, including administering injections and force feeding. You may even used this to perform minor surgical procedures such as tail tip amputation in severe infections, or biopsies for disease identification. There are many different kinds of anesthetics for fish, MS-222 or Clove Oil being the most common. Because clove oil is easy to obtain though health food stores, this article discusses its use. MS-222 should come with instructions of its own. Note: Clove oil has been found to be toxic in humans and mice, so it may be in fish as well. This should not be use often for that reason.
Clove oil needs to be emulsified to work. This is what the small vial is for. Put a little bit of tank water from the first shallow dish in the small vial and add clove oil. You’ll be using two – three drops of clove oil per liter of water. Shake the vial well, and add to the first dish. Mix the water. At this point you can add the seahorse.
Catheter used for reviving sedated seahorses.
It takes 3- 6 minutes for the seahorse to become sedated. You must watch it closely in this time to make sure it doesn’t completely stop breathing. Also, some seahorses do not like this process, and may literally jump. This is normal, but you want to watch to make sure one doesn’t get enough height to actually get out of the dish. While its passing out, you’ll want to prepare the syringe you’ll need to revive it with. Take a syringe without needle and place the catheter tip on it. Fill it with water from the second dish (no clove oil). When you are ready to revive the seahorse, you will place this in the snout and depress the plunger to pass fresh seawater over the seahorses gills. If the seahorse appears to completely stop breathing at any point during sedation, you will also use this to revive the seahorse.
Once sedated, you can do pretty much anything you need to to the seahorse. Some don’t seem to pass completely out and may move a little when anything truly invasive is done, such as a biopsy. So be prepared and expect a little movement. I tried to keep all my procedures under 10 minutes, although I’ve heard they can be kept under for over an hour safely. Since I have never done this, I would not recommend trying it. If you do have to leave it sedated for a long period of time, keep a close eye on the gill movement. I would even go so far as to recommend using your fresh seawater syringe and passing water over the gills every ten minutes.
Reviving a sedated seahorse.
When you are finished and ready to revive the seahorse, place it in the second shallow dish. Insert the syringe in its snout just past is mouth opening (it doesn’t need to be very far in). Depress the syringes plunger to pass water over the gills. I usually do short bursts like if it were breathing. Do this until it is breathing is regular again. NOTE: Some times it seems to take a VERY long time to revive them. I had one that seemed to have completely stopped breathing. I was sure I had lost it, but I continued to attempt to revive it even though I was sure it was dead. After about 5 minutes, it started breathing again. I wouldn’t give up for at least 10 minutes of reviving. Even then, leave it in the fresh tank water for an hour just in case. There have been stories of Koi appearing to be dead and then hours later reviving. Its not likely to come back after 10 minutes of constant reviving, but it doesn’t hurt to wait before disposing of the body, just in case.
I have a question….. I found a beautiful sea horse on the beach on the sand… I tried to return it to the Ocean in Bahia Brazil but it seemed to be drowning so I took it out and tried to revive it at home, sadly it died a few hours later. It is about 6 inches long… had no visible injuries… why do you think this beautiful animal was on the sand and why do you think it died…
I feel sad it died but so is nature…
Thank you,
March 20th, 2009 at 4:59 pmKurt
Its impossible to say, but the fact that you found it on the sand is not a good sign to begin with. Chances are it was already dying and that’s why it washed ashore. Maybe old age, who knows? A six inch seahorse from that area is probable an adult H. reidi. But great job in trying to save it, I’m sure it was better dying in piece rather than baking in the sun.
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:06 amwow, this is great! i never thought something like this exist! been planning to breed seahorses but a friend told me that seahorses are so far hard to breed because they don’t survive long especially in aquariums. i wonder why, must be some kind of a joke…
December 4th, 2009 at 6:18 pmSeahorses can be a challenge to keep in aquariums, especially if you don’t provide them with the appropriate environments. Many people have then attributed the premature death of their seahorse as not being long lived. Most larger species of seahorses live a good 5 years or more.
December 5th, 2009 at 1:57 am