A fish-surgery class at the University of Melbourne
Credit: Glenn Hunt
Lewbart loves fish medicine - he flies around the world teaching and practising it; he publishes scholarly articles and books on it. But he's not all fish. "My real love is marine invertebrates," he told me: snails, worms, horseshoe crabs. "It's still a little down the road when people are going to start bringing those guys to the vet. But I think it'll happen in the same way fish medicine happened."
Fish medicine actually dates to the 19th century, but it didn't start to catch on until the 1970s and 80s, when scientists started publishing research articles about everything from fish hormones and nutrition to pondside operating tables. But that had nothing to do with pets. Until Lewbart published his surgery paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in 1995, references to fish medicine came from fisheries, marine biology and wildlife.
In the late 1970s, a few obscure papers mentioned the burgeoning field of pet fish; some even said vets should make the transition from aquaculture to pets. But that didn't happen for more than a decade, until koi exploded into a multimillion-dollar industry, the Internet appeared and owners started typing "fish veterinarian" into search engines. When they found research papers by vets like Lewbart, owners started calling and emailing. "I never thought of being a fish vet," said Julius Tepper of the Long Island Fish Hospital. "Then I got a call from a guy wondering if I treated fish or knew someone who did. I said, 'No, actually, I don't.' Then I was like, Why didn't I think of this earlier?"
Pet-fish medicine isn't exactly mainstream: many owners don't know fish vets exist; others look but can't find them. The AVMA and several vets are working on databases for referring clients, but they're not available yet. Until then, Lewbart will keep fielding 400 to 500 calls and email messages a year from people with fish questions, and many owners will take matters into their own hands. Just like Bonita Wulf, who isn't an actual fish anaesthetist; she's a fish hobbyist with a gravelly smoker's voice and a very large gun collection. (As Roberts tells me, you don't joke about flushing fish with a woman like Bonnie.) Wulf talks to her fish and carries pictures of them in her purse. "I've got grandkids too," she says with a grin, "but I only carry fish pictures". She has taken more courses in fish health and medicine than most veterinarians, and she started by Googling the word "koi". Inevitably, that leads to KoiVet.com, an all-you-need-to-know-about-fish website, and Aquamaniacs.net. Between the two, thousands of fish hobbyists join message boards for moral support and immediate do-it-yourself help during fish crises. They're starting to refer one another to fish vets although, traditionally, fish medicine is one of the few areas where pet owners, as a rule, know more than veterinarians. But things have changed: U.S. veterinary schools are starting to teach fish medicine.
I recently went to North Carolina to visit a seminar at one of the only aquatic-medicine departments in the world, which Lewbart oversees. He and his colleagues also run a one-week intensive fish-medicine course, as well as the world's only aquatic-medicine residency. Their courses are always full. On the first day of the seminar, eight veterinary students from around the U.S. learned to catch, anaesthetise and transport fish. They drew blood, took fin and scale samples, looked under microscopes for parasites. They saw an underwater frog with a fluid-retention problem, and a turtle filled with rocks it wasn't supposed to eat. The seminar is about 25 per cent aquatic reptiles and 75 per cent fish, but the first day, there were no sick fish. And it was sunny outside, so Lewbart took everyone out in the open for ice cream and a fish-medicine lecture. As he sat in the sun wearing black plastic sunglasses - ice cream in one hand, fish book in the other - Lewbart talked about fish cancer and carp herpes. "Are there any questions?" he asked eventually. A student from Pennsylvania raised his hand: "Can a person make a living as a fish vet?"
The answer is yes and no: despite hourly rates up to US$100 for 'tank calls', business would be tight for a full-time pet-fish vet today. Some successful pet-fish vets work in fisheries, public aquariums, zoos or the tropical-fish industry; others supplement their practices with teaching and research. But most pet-fish vets must treat other animals too. "Dogs and cats are the 'meat and potatoes'," Roberts says. "Fish are the spice." That's likely to be true for a while. "Fish medicine is still a hobby," Tepper says. "It costs me thousands of dollars a year." He blames this in part on seasonality - koi are dormant in winter - so he and others are encouraging preventive fish medicine.
That's what's unusual about the Golden One's surgery: she's perfectly healthy. Spaying means Roberts won't have to face the ethical baby-placement issue, but it's also a business move. "If I can master this," says Roberts, "I can offer it to owners who say, 'I really love this goldfish, I just don't want a thousand more'."
Fifteen minutes before the Golden One would be up and darting around her pond looking for food, Roberts poked around in the fish's abdomen. She was telling Wulf about her new video game, when she stopped mid sentence. "Look at that, Bonnie." Roberts pulled a long yellow gelatinous strand from the Golden One's belly. "That looks male, doesn't it?" Bonnie nodded. "Yep, Helen, that's male." Roberts laughed. "How could you be male? You look so female!"
"Don't spay that one," Bonnie said.
"OK," Roberts shot back, chipper as always. "We'll neuter him." Then she turned to me and whispered: "Fish medicine isn't an exact science yet. But we're working on it."
Rebecca Skloot is a journalist in New York. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will be published by Crown in 2006.
