YWG mouth torn up

[neltel_7]

Hello all,

I added a yellow watchman goby to my 90 gallon tank the 4 days ago, no QT as I got it from a store I trust and get all my fish from. Its tank mates are a kole yellow eye tang, a Sri Lanka dottyback, canary fang blenny, 2 skunk clownfish 3 firefish, and a diamond goby.

Literally none of the fish take any notice of it. On the first day it freaked out a bit and was swimming oddly but the next day it was perfectly fine and has been fine until today when I noticed it was swimming very slowly, not hiding in the cave it’s usually in and had what seems to be tears near it’s mouth.

I don’t have a test kit on hand for water parameters as it was misplaced, but everything else in the tank seems to be doing fine.

Any suggestions on next steps I should take?

The purple area is the top of the mouth that seems discolored and a bit torn up.

 

[neltel_7]

Side note I also have yet to directly see it eat.

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

Side note I also have yet to directly see it eat.

It may well have tangled with another fish - one bite takes just a split second and you could easily miss that.

It might have gotten spooked and ran into something in the tank.

Trouble is, there is no medication for this sort of mechanical damage. The best you can do is isolate it in an acclimation chamber and see if it can recover.

 

[neltel_7]

It may well have tangled with another fish - one bite takes just a split second and you could easily miss that.

It might have gotten spooked and ran into something in the tank.

Trouble is, there is no medication for this sort of mechanical damage. The best you can do is isolate it in an acclimation chamber and see if it can recover.

If I can catch it I might try that out, I have a very dense rock structure. Otherwise I’ll just hope that maybe it was a minor injury and it finds somewhere to hide and recover.
Thanks!

 

[neltel_7]

Here are some more photos. The mouth looks super swollen

 

[Jay Hemdal Verified Community Expert]

Here are some more photos. The mouth looks super swollen

I ran a google search - because this scenario sounded kind of familiar. Turns out, we've had a few issues just like this here on R2R, and there are other cases on other sites.

This species is really prone to developing bacterial skin infections, usually along their sides. I'm wondering now, if these "mouth injuries" are the same sort of infection, but on their mouths?

If so, you would want to treat this with an antibiotic like Neoplex in a treatment tank.

Jay