Strange Swelling

My T.gran Peter has a strange swelling in his chin/neck area. It almost looks like a fatty deposit. He has been spending most of his time out of the water on a piece of driftwood. He usually spends all of his time in the water and is active. He has been very lethargic for the past couple of days. Has anyone seen anything like it?






(Message edited by jennewt on January 29, 2006)

He is very Bloated. It could be alot of things liver problems, over feeding, it is hard to tell without taking them to the vet.

Unfortunately, yes, I've seen similar problems before:
http://www.caudata.org/forum/messages/7/13480.html
http://www.caudata.org/forum/messages/7/18577.html

(Message edited by jennewt on January 29, 2006)

I decided not to wait until Monday but instead to take Peter to the emergency vet last night. Thankfully a clinic specializing in birds and exotics was only a few minutes away from my house.

After palpating the swelling the vet first thought it might be a foreign object but when she tried to remove it and bring it to the front it would not dislodge. She said that she had never seen anything like it before. The growth feels very hard and has definite boundaries, like a foreign object, and on palpitation it moves under the skin.

The vet works at our local aquarium and she will check with colleagues who work with amphibians to see if they ever encountered anything like it. She mentioned chalk bags in caecilians. Do newts have anything similar in their anatomy? Could it be part of a hardened or enlarged larynx? On palpitation Peter seemed slightly bloated in the abdominal region. We started him on .03 mills of Baytril (2.27mg/ml Dilution) once daily for 7 days. The vet suggested oral administration rather than topical.
If Peter does not improve we will do a fecal.

Peter is currently set up in a quarantine tank with water and a piece of driftwood to provide some area out of the water. He is definitely not bloated from overfeeding and the vet strongly recommended to keep his weight up. I just fed him some live black worms before administering the medication and he did eat a few.

Peter spends most time laying half submerged in water and his head propped up on the wood. It almost seems as if he is trying to find a comfortable position for his swollen neck.

I have a very small water filter, an Elite Mini A-130. Would you recommend to run it in the quarantine tank?
If anyone has encountered anything like this with their newts, please let me know.
I will keep you posted with any new developments.

Good luck with your newt!!! It's very sad and scary when one of our little friends may be sick. It's a good thing you took him to a vet right away, better to be safe than sorry. Let us know how things develop!

Hi everyone,

I took Peter to the vet a second time. The vet had suggested taking an x-ray to find out what the lump in Peter’s lower jaw could be. Unfortunately the x-ray was inconclusive and we still don’t know what it is. I will get a digital copy of the x-ray in a couple of days and post it on the forum as it may be of interest to some.

Peter has been on Baytril since Sunday and the vet suggested to also start bathing him in Ringer’s Solution to balance his electrolytes. I thought I read some articles on Ringer’s solution on this forum, but I can’t seem to locate them. If anyone has a link, please let me know.

It turns out that the ingredients for the Ringer’s Solution are harder to get than expected. Does anyone know where to get them? I actually had to put an order in with a pharmacy to get the salts. In the meantime the vet is giving me a solution that is very similar to Ringer’s, only not as precise.

The Ringer’s solution that I will put together with the raw ingredients has following composition:

NaCl (Sodium Chloride) 1 Liter Distilled Water: 6.6 g/1 Gallon Distilled Water:25 g
KCl (Potassium Chloride) 1 Liter Distilled Water:.15 g/1 Gallon Distilled Water:.57 g
CaCl2 (Calcium Chloride)/1 Liter Distilled Water: .15 g/1 Gallon Distilled Water:.57 g
NaHCO3 (Sodium bicarbonate)/1 Liter Distilled Water:.2 g/1 Gallon Distilled Water:.76 g

Your recipe is exactly the same as the one we have for Amphibian Ringer's:
http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/bloatEDK.shtml

For NaCl you can use non-iodized table salt. For sodium bicarbonate, that's baking soda. The others are not so easy to locate. I didn't know you could get them from a pharmacy - that is useful to know.