Progression of shrunken eye in Polypedates dennysii

[aquamentus11]

Sorry to keep littering the forum with these, but I thought this was interesting enough to start a new thread compiling the pictures I've taken to document the progression of the strangely underdeveloped left eye of my juvenile Chinese gliding frog. The last pic is from this morning.


here's the right eye. this is the unaffected one.

the affected left eye a week and a half ago. at this point, the pupil was always contracted unless in full darkness, but the eye had not started to look as strikingly small as it does now. soon after this, i received opthalmic ointment from the vet and began to put it on for a week. it never looked cloudy, inflamed or in any other way infected. the antibiotic obviously didn't help. he was a very good little patient though

he's grown roughly .25" since the above pics were taken and the eye seems to have stayed the same size.


this is him this morning looking nice and chubby enlarge the image and look at this one closely. that white area between the gold of his eye and the blue skin above is a gap where the eye at rest has retracted into the orbit leaving an empty space. this corrects itself when he's fully awake. the eye seems to be fully functional: it retracts to swallow and when he's actually asleep and the pupil fully dilates when he's hunting at night. he's obviously able to hunt down food because he's been growing like crazy and is putting on weight.

anyway, i'm stumped on this one. he was perfect 3 weeks ago. i can't imagine when he would have injured it: i rarely handled him before i became aware of the eye and actually only had him about 2-3 weeks before it became this way. it's obviously not nutritional given his otherwise great health and i dust alternately with herpivite and Ca2+. he gets 12h of UVB and temps range from 70-80F. he goes to the vet at 1:20 today, but as I've said before, I don't think there's much we can do for him. it seems to be congenital to me and i would guess that my only choice is to just keep providing good nutrition and hope it begins to grow again. i worry about infection in the future and things getting stuck in there or possibly the eye becoming permanently retracted when the orbit itself becomes too large. i had plans for a more naturalistic viv than he has now, but if this persists, i'm going to stick with paper towel to avoid the possibility of substrate getting in there. has anyone ever had experience with or heard of anything like this?

[aquamentus11]

another view to compare to the right side below

[aquamentus11]

as expected, the vet said there wasn't anything to be done. she had seen something like this before in reptiles and said that it has been known to resolve spontaneously or with steroid ointment, though no one was sure what caused it. since his visions seems unaffected, she wants to see what happens before adding steroids (which i agree with). she was much more knowledgeable than i expected and seemed to truly be somewhat of a specialist on reptiles and amphibians. anyway, we'll see what happens.