Chinchilla Nation

Posts Tagged ‘scab’

Bloodsuckers

December 14th, 2009

Are invading the hamsters!!

At first, it was Almond the roborovski; there was some fur loss around her cheeks & her back, some scabbing on her back, & some flaking on her bare skin. Initially I thought it was because Kat & Joy had overgroomed her or they had been fighting. When I removed Almond to be in a cage by herself, even though the original scabs, there were more scabbing not long after. At that point, I suspected that she was scratching herself so bad to the point that she scabbed herself.

Last month, vet scraped some of Almond’s skins & placed them on a slide .. sure enough the vet saw lots of mites & mite eggs breeding on Almond. Euw! She’s now on Ivermectin (medication for mites), 3 doses of 0.01 ml given 2 weeks apart. Ivermectin is a very strong medication & it had to be diluted for Almond’s dosage due to her small size. Besides, 1 dose is not enough to kill all the mites as mites have successive breeding stages, that’s why they are given 2 weeks apart.

I thought it was strange that only Almond was infested with mites since she had shared a cage with Joy & Kat. Well, a couple of weeks after Almond was discovered with mites, I saw the same symptoms on Joy & Kat: excessive scratching to the point that they bruise themselves & flaking. Off to the vet they went on the 9th of November & now they’re also on 3 doses of Ivermectin.

The vet said that they could’ve gotten mites either from the bedding (I read that people bake their bedding to kill mites, but I don’t want to use the oven that I cook with in order to kill bugs) or from the petstore (it’s just that the robos have always been asymptomatic until now). I’ll just have to stick to the medications & hopefully by the end of the third dosage, all the mites will have been killed. Vet recommended that I clean the cages & the toys in 39 part water & 1 part bleach. Afterwards, air dry them as any remaining chlorine will evaporate.

Almond fur loss

Almond before the vet visit; fur loss around the cheek area; if you right click & “View Image,” you can see flakes in her ear

Almond mites
Almond after the vet visit; vet had scraped off some of the mites from the skin; Almond’s skin is dry because it’s exposed to Aspen bedding & I’ve been applying olive oil on it once every 2 days