Originally Posted by Bogertophis
Necropsies are a couple hundred dollars in many cases (gross necropsies are sometimes a hundred dollars or less, and then histopathology samples another hundred or somewhat more). Whether that's expensive for a chance of knowing what a keeper brought into their collection is probably different for different keepers. At least some vets send out their necropsies, certainly the histo and other specialized samples, so any vet can line one up, at least in theory. You're right that they don't always give a clear answer, but not getting one is 100% likely to not give a clear answer. What a necropsy can often do is rule out the most scary possibilities, and to some keepers that might be worth a lot.
"Failure to thrive" is a catch-all for situations where we don't know what's causing the difficulty. Something is causing the failure to thrive, though. Unfortunately, the fact that nearly all reptile deaths aren't investigated keeps us in the dark about what's causing the deaths. I'd suspect amoeba first in a non-feeding case where environmental parameters are acceptable, which is pretty easy to rule out with necropsy or in live animals PCR swab or even shotgunning metronidazole, but unfortunately not a lot of keepers do this.
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