# sick pumilio



## ggazonas (May 11, 2008)

I have a sick pumilio which seems to be the result of stress. I placed him with a large female, since he had been calling his head off for a month straight. A while after them being together all calling stopped and he began hiding from her. He is now separate and I placed my other male with ehr and they are doing just fine.The female was clean, and treated and the males were also treated. 

His symptoms are spitting out food when he eats, keeping his mouth open and weight lose.

The viv parameters are:

70-80 degree range from night to day
over 80% humididty
misted 3 times a day 
heptivite and repcal are the vitamens I use on their food items
Springtails in their tank, feed ff's daily and occasionlay flour beetle larva

Currently he is being treated with metrinidizol. One drop a day, and I started this 3 days ago, but I have not seen any improvements yet.I was also told I could use 23% gluconate.

Any thoughts or suggestion would be great.


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## nish07 (Mar 16, 2008)

The gluconate needs to be diluted to 2 to 2.3 percent. 

I'd put him in a tub with leaves/plant cuttings and a film canister on the ground to hide in (though enough leaf litter usually works as good or better). I don't know how you culture springs, but an area like a few chunks of charcoal where the springs can be isolated (since the tub you put him in won't have a thriving population of springs) would be best. The metronidazole seems to be hit or miss but more hit than miss. Soaking in ringers never hurts and I've found that to be hit or miss too but more hit than miss (nothing spectacular but they seem to de-stress some after it.) If not a soak then spray them with it when you mist them. I'm also beginning to believe that UV helps Pums quite a bit but you need to be careful. Some bulbs are massive in UV output and don't really help the way they need to. ReptiSun 5.0 seems to be the best way to go. Realize that UV doesn't go through plastic or glass so seran wrap is a decent (but annoying) way to get it through to the frog. Make sure, if you do use the UV bulb, that you place it a good 12-15 or so inches away from where the frog spends most of its time.

-Nish


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## ggazonas (May 11, 2008)

Where can I get gluconate from? I will give him a pedialyte bath with cal and herptivite. I was told that it is basically the same idea as using ringer solution.
I having been using metrinidazol on an auratus I have and he seems to be improving greatly. He looked like he was going to make it the other day, but now he is eating well and starting to gain some weight.
Anyways I will try to give him more springtails and see how that goes.


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## nish07 (Mar 16, 2008)

The idea behind giving a bath is to creating an isotonic solution for the Frog. Pedialyte is close where Ringers is much more accurate to the needs of the frog. You soak the frog in Ringers because the frog spends its energy maintaining an osmotic balance of water absorbed and released in its body. Also, Pedialyte has sugar in it and will go bad fairly soon after it's opened so cap it and refrigerate it and dump out the old stuff.

If you're not into science, think of it like this. If you had a permeable bag full of water and a certain concentration of ions in solution (calcium, sodium etc...) and you put this in a tub with pure water, the ions would move out of the bag until the concentrations of the ions within the bag and outside of the bag were equal. Call the bag the frog. The frog needs to keep in certain ammounts of these ions to live and (possibly) keep out others. This works for water too. It moves in and out with the concentration gradient. The frog spends energy keeping its osmotic balance. If it's stressed, the theory is that if you put the frog in an isotonic (equal ammounts solutes and water as per what the frog has inside it's plasma/lymph fluids etc.) it won't have to work to maintain that osmotic balance. It can therefor bypass expending this extra energy and recuperate. Also, the theory is that if the frog needs some of the solutes in the ringers, it will absorb them. 

If you get pedialyte (which is sort of close to ringers osmotically), you don't want to add more solutes to it or you're defeating the purpose. You could be causing the frog to lose water as it would be leaving the frog and going with its concentration gradient and therefor causing dehydration. This would be a 'hyper'tonic solution. This is the reason why some frogs with bloat are treated with a hypertonic solution as you want to pull excess fluid out of the frog if you can.

I've had no great success with calcium gluconate but other people have and I still do keep it and use it just incase (it does contain glucose which might be absorbed and used for a bit of energy). Again, this needs to be diluted to 2 to 2.3 percent strength from the usual 23% concentration its sold in. You can find this at TSC or Farm stores as it's used intravenously in cows.

With pumilio, it seems to be that they always like to eat small bugs (springs) throughout the day. Even the frogs that eat flies will sit around and eat springs throughout the day where they'll go after flies once in a while or during one specific time of day. Springs seem to be the way to help them get back to eating big foods.

I've had great luck with the UV too but it can be tricky. The UV really seems to help (saved a seizing pum I had) but you could overdo it with the wrong bulb. Also, the temp of around 78-80 seems to be where they're happy.

-Nish


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