Have you ever performed operations on fish and if so what goes on to monitor the fish and do you use clove oil as a numbing agent?

drferox:

Nope, we would actually use proper anaesthetic agents, like alfaxalone, to anaesthetise the fish. you need to keep water running over their gills with the anaesthetic in it, and you switch to clean water once you’re done, which is functionally like keeping an air breather on anaesthetic gas.

We cannot use all our regular monitoring for mammals on a fish, either because the equipment isn’t waterproof, or the fish is just too small. There is a degree of trust and hope involved in anaesthetising a fish, because the technology is not as adapted to them.

And definitely no electrocautery is to be used on fish.

Clove oil is a sedative, not necessarily a numbing agent. Difficult to test how much it actually numbs anything on a fish.