Microscope came in today. Took one fresh sample from a healthier male dragon.


Poo cocktail elixir...


I put the poo in a glass beaker and stirred it vigorously. (Nearly puked got a small whiff)

Then I let the poo sit for about 5mins.

I then took a cover slip and wearing rubber surgical gloves with a small tweezer I dipped it onto the top layer of the poo float.

I used a fully saturated epson salt solution.

I looked at the slide in great detail at 400X and 1000X resolution and could find no coccidia oocysts or coccidea. I have seen coccidia when looking at floats at my vets office.

The coccidea themselves move quickly and will scoot out of the field of view alomst instantly... also... the parasites have obvious internal structures where as the nomal gut flora and bacteria do not.

Im not sure how you could ever say that coccidia are part of their normal gutload or that coccidia "you will always find some of them relatively speaking. In the fecal exams." This is a falacy.



These are parasites that rapidly multiply and infest. They are ravenous and not innocuous (harmless) gut flora. Not by any stretch of the imagination.


In bigger grazing animals/mammals you might be able to say this to a limited extent... not with dragons however.


I did see gut flora and bacteria moving around everywhere. These are distinctly different and have no internal structures whatsoever.


This is a good site with images:

http://www.pet-informed-veterinary-advice-online.com/fecal-float.html



Im going to get a more expensive microscope. This one doesnt impress me.

















A word of caution...

Be aware of the effects of salty fecal float solutions on the shapes of parasites. These hypertonic solutions suck water from the bodies of larval parasites and free-swimming parasitic protozoa (e.g. Giardia and Trichomonas), killing them (such that they stop moving) and also distorting and shrivelling up their outlines (such that they do not look like typical worms or protozoans anymore). This can make these organisms difficult to identify. For this reason, it is important that fecal float tests are examined as soon as they are performed, so as to reduce the amount of time the parasite spends exposed to the distorting medium.

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