Minimizing anesthetic risks in amphibian patients

In this interview with dvm360 on his lecture Navigating Amphibian Anesthesia and Analgesia, presented at the 2025 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jb Minter, DVM, MS, DACZM, director of animal health and chief veterinarian at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, North Carolina, talks about anesthetic risks in amphibian patients. Minter explains that these risks are similar to the ones mammalian patients face and offers advice for minimizing complications in these animals.

Below is the interview transcript, lightly edited for clarity:

Jb Minter, DVM, MS, DACZM: When I think about anesthetic complications with my amphibian patients, they're very similar to the ones that I would think about for my mammalian patients.

So hyperthermia is one. So since like I said, I mentioned that amphibians are ectothermic...which means they [have] an inability to maintain their own body temperature. Maintaining that appropriate body temperature during anesthesia is going to be critical. So if the temperatures drop too low, that slows down their metabolic rate quite a bit and that basically includes their drug metabolism, which can potentially lead to prolonged anesthesia recovery or even death, if you've gotten them too chilly.

So ways of minimizing that...just provide them some type of warming support. Cardiovascular compromise, again, if they get a little chilly, they have a lower heart rate anyways and lower blood pressure. So...again, going back to that temperature regulation, it can become problematic for amphibians with these limited cardiovascular reserves, so you want to make sure that you use lower doses of drugs and then maintain that optimal temperature range.

And then another one I always like to think about is, again, they rely heavily on their skin for gas exchange and certain anesthetic agents can depress that respiratory function, which can lead to hypoxia. So just closely monitor their oxygen output and [make] sure that they're breathing throughout the process.