"Aquavets" keep fish afloat

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Dr. Lance Adams preps for surgery, snapping on latex gloves under a clear blue sky.

Nearby, a medical team wearing hooded wet suits hoists the anesthetized patient out of the pool and onto a makeshift operating table.

Adams, gripping sterile scissors, confers with specialists on respiration rates and oxygen levels. "How's her gilling?" he asks.

He is about to mend a wound with the aid of boat glue, rubber bands and Popsicle sticks. A diaper will be employed. Also a garden hose.

In this watery wing of surgery, it takes high-tech medicine and ingenuity to give a fish a nose job.

As staff veterinarian to the 12,500 animals at the Aquarium of the Pacific, Adams is among a growing number of aquatic specialists bringing treatment more common to humans and pets into the tank.

He is almost comically stoic when describing the nose job on the freshwater sawfish, whose body looks more like a shark's. He rattles off other recent cases. Removing an eel's tumor. Bandaging the ulcer of a sea horse. Draining the wrist abscess of a sea turtle. Using ultrasound on a sea otter.

And then there are the fake fish eyes.

Tank injuries, parasites and bites from other fish make eye injuries common, Adams said, so he and other aquatic veterinarians, such as Dr. Mike Murray at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, do the occasional prosthetic eye job.

In the past, most sick fish were pulled out of the tank and fresh fish dropped in.

"We used to call it replacement therapy," Murray said. "Now we say, 'Let's fix them.' "

With an increasing number of aquariums, a booming commercial fish-farming trade and more collectors of pricey fish, the number of aquatic doctors has swelled in the past 10 years, said William Van Bonn, president of the International Association for Aquatic Animal Medicine. The group has 500 members.

Van Bonn said many of the roughly 30 accredited aquariums in the United States employed "aquavets," as one of the trade Web sites calls them. And they are inventing ways to help animals live longer.

"The same technology that would be used to give you a tubal ligation or remove a gallbladder, we can use for sea otters, fish, birds," Murray said.

Beyond medical care for animals, Adams and Murray agreed, there is a practical need for aquariums' exhibited animals to look healthy. About 190,000 schoolchildren take field trips to the Long Beach aquarium each year, and seeing animals with gaping wounds could upset them.

"Part of what we do is cosmetic," Murray said. "You can't really put a fish on exhibit with a cavity where the eyeball was. The public just won't accept it."

That was true to a degree with the sawfish.

The endangered fish, a freshwater species that can also live in saltwater, has a long, square-tipped nose ringed by horizontal "teeth."

The Long Beach aquarium's sawfish was obtained by a collector in Australia, where the species is threatened by dwindling habitat. Adams thinks a shark at the aquarium that usually wouldn't bother the sawfish may have snapped at it, fracturing the saw and hindering the creature's ability to feed.

The operation took place outdoors, before the aquarium opened. The cloth diaper, soft and water-absorbent, kept the fish's eyes wet and shielded them from light and movement.

Just after 10 a.m., as schoolchildren began streaming into the aquarium and heading for the popular shark lagoon, Adams and his team patted their patient under a wet towel, its wound stitched up, the Popsicle sticks affixed with waterproof boat glue to the side "teeth." Rubber bands held the Popsicle-stick splints in place while the glue hardened.

The 6-foot-3 sawfish was safely plopped back into her post-op recovery room, the shallow end of the lagoon.

Adams, 35, grew up in Orange County, Calif., and worked at a tropical-fish store during high school. When he started college, he said, there were fewer than 20 aquatic veterinarians in the United States.

"It wasn't just that I worked at a tropical-fish store for a high-school job," Adams said. "I really liked fish. I think they're incredibly fascinating and incredibly beautiful. How they live, their adaptation, their gilling, blood flow. Marine life and ocean life are ... it's another world. Like I'm getting to go to another planet."

"The passion and commitment Lance brings ... has elevated the quality of care," said Jerry Schubel, chief executive of the aquarium, and Adams has inspired colleagues to find creative ways to treat animals.

And the sawfish?

"It's doing just fine," he said. "It has no visible sign of an injury."