Vet gives bullied fish a prosthetic eye

By Jessica Pineda

A fish named Kiwi wasn’t doing well when he developed a cataract. His tank mates started bullying him.

“They figured out which eye was not working,” said owner, Julie Morgan, to Fox6Now. “They’d go up behind him, biting his tail. He had chunks of his tail taken out.”

Kiwi was taken to Megan Baebler of Kersting Veterinary Hospital in Chesterfield, Mo. She removed the cataract, and then the eye. Then she decided to give Kiwi a prosthetic eye.

“I actually hand-painted the eye myself,” she told Fox6Now. “I used a mixture of some nail polish and some eye shadow pigments, actually, to give it some iridescence.”

It took 30 minutes to place the eye inside Kiwi. The surgery worked well, and now Kiwi is swimming happily in his own tank.  Morgan hopes he may be returned to the other tank eventually.

According to Babler, “the procedure … is the second procedure of its kind and the first on a privately owned fish.”