Yesterday afternoon when walking past the pond I noticed with alarm there was a 75 cm koi lying at the bottom of the pond. Grabbing the net and getting it to the surface I saw it was dead. This was real strange as the morning when I fed them all the koi were eating.
As none of the koi were flashing I thought that there could not be any paracite problems. I have had some PH spikes lately touching on 9.1 and thought that maybe the koi died from PH poisening. Inspecting the gills there were no problems and they were beautiful and red. I then noticed there was some blood oozing from the anus and decided to not bother with a scrape but rahter do an autopsy and this is what I found:
The koi was full of eggs but the stomach was not bulging. I previously had a koi die due to being egg-bound and this was not the same. I immediately noticed that the eggs were full of blood:
Just under the fin on the left side of the photo I noticed a white spot and pressing on it I felt something hard. I decided to investigate a bit closer:
I carefully started open up the spot and the buldge became very distinct:
And the bulge grew the further I went. It was at this stage that I realized that this is a tumour that has developed right inside the egg sack:
Finally I got it out and you can clearly notice the blood vessels where it was attached to the inside of the fish:
When I seperated the tumour it was about 7 cm in diameter.
In handling the tumour I could feel some rock hard bits on it and decided to cut it open:
The inside of the tumour was rock hard with what seemed like a muscle type substance and with hard "sand" type grains about the size of course salt.
I think it was inevetable that the fish would have died but interestingly it showed no ill affects up front and had zero bulges on its side.
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