Got a sick fish? Call the fish vet
Mobile practice: ‘Fish deserve to be happy and healthy,’ says Dr. Jessie Sanders, one of a very few veterinarians in California who specialize in treating fish
There’s something fishy about Dr. Jessie Sanders’ Watsonville veterinary practice.
There are no sweet puppies, no cuddly kittens, not even a snake or parrot hanging around her waiting room. Actually, there’s no waiting room.
Sanders is a vet with a mobile practice — a doctor who makes pond calls to see lethargic koi, angelfish with fin rot or a wobbly molly that keeps floating on its side. That her vehicle is a brightorange car with more than a passing resemblance to Nemo of Pixar movie fame adds a dash of whimsy to what is a serious business, especially mid-pandemic.
Just like puppy and kitten adoptions, the sale of ornamental fish in the U.S. has soared since the start of the pandemic. With people stuck at home, many thought now would be a good time to put in that huge aquarium or koi pond they’d been talking about for years, says Sanders, the 2020 president of the American Association of Fish Veterinarians. But there’s considerably more to fish care than filling up a tank and scattering food flakes.
A fish vet is a rarity in a profession that specializes in specialties. While some vets center their practices on dogs and cats, others care for farm animals and some treat wild animals or exotic pets exclusively. While nearly 2,000 vets are trained in aquatic veterinary medicine in the U.S., only about 100 of them exclusively treat pet fish.
“Doing all fish is very rare,” Sanders admits, and she’s on a mission. “The world needs to see pet fish on the same level as cats or dogs and require of pet owners the same standards, no matter if their pet runs or swims. Fish deserve to be happy and healthy, free from stress and disease, living their best lives possible.”
That means knowing what you’re getting into before you start populating that fish tank. A lot of fish illnesses are related to water quality, Sanders says, and not having your tank established before adding fish can be deadly.
New owners don’t want to wait, Sanders says, “They get a tank, and they want to put fish in right away.”
But even non-newbies can run into trouble. The koi pond in Sean O’halloran’s Los Gatos backyard was already established, but a January rainstorm unleashed something bad. Suddenly, his fish began dying. Sanders rushed to the pond, diagnosed bacteria in the water and treated the fish with antibiotics.
“She saved my fish,” O’halloran says. “She literally saved my fish.”
Finned creatures were not Sanders’ first love growing up. As a child, she begged her parents for a kitten, going to the library and checking out the same “how to care for kittens” book more than a dozen times to prove to them she would know what she was doing. By the time she got her first kitten, Frisco, she did.
The fascination with ocean life likely came from her father, an oceanographer. Sanders studied marine biology at the University of Rhode Island, but it was her volunteer work at Connecticut’s Mystic Aquarium that pushed her toward vet school and fish.
“They ended up putting me in the fish department,” Sanders says, “and I loved every minute of it. I went to vet school planning to become a fish vet.”
At Tufts University, her desire to specialize in fish medicine was not well received by either her fellow students or her professors, who thought she was limiting herself. So she sought out a community of fish doctors, finding them through two summer programs — AQUAVET, a summer program offered by Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania, and MARVET, a program through St. Matthew’s University that offered a summer on Grand Cayman Island.
In 2013, she opened her own fish practice, Aquatic Veterinary Services, and since then has written a guidebook on koi care and a series of children’s books starring Boo and Bubbles — the latter’s the fish. It takes education, she says, to turn a fish owner into a “skilled aquatic pet parent.”
And when trouble strikes, she strikes out across the bay on house calls. The life of a fish vet is different from that of other veterinarians, she concedes. It’s a lot wetter, but bites and scratches from her patients are exceedingly rare.
Contact Joan Morris at 925977-8479.