Our pond pump quit working today and when we went to replace it my husband found one of our large goldfish stuck in the housing for the pump. He is about 6-7 inches long. The fish's tail got mostly chewed up by the pump and his side is injured pretty bad. He is alive and has been set up in a seperate medical tank while we figure out what to do. He has to be hurting, what do we do?

My questions are these:

Can we treat the fish with wounds like this and how? Will it survive with out most of its tail? Has anyone ever heard if the tails can grow back?

Any help you could provide would be great!

Marsha
parksfy@comcast.net

I would cover your new pump with a pre-filter to lessen this happening again. I set my pump into a holed pond plant basket with filter material (I call it floss) wrapped around it. This reduces the suction. I still get a few fish per year that swim down into the floss and get stuck and die though, usually when the pond is frozen over or during the main spring spawning.

I've recovered a few fish that were torn up. It depends on how bad it is. A healthy fish wouldn't get sucked into the filter unless it was super strong so the fish may not be healthy to start though. See http://www.fishpondinfo.com/health5.htm#cut for how I treated one fish from my pond who was injured.

Tails will grow back if the support structures are there. The tail will never look 100% normal though. If the support veins are gone, the tail will only grow back a tiny bit. Fish who lose all of their caudal fin usually don't survive due to trouble swimming.