| Axolotls |
| I was trying to get a few pictures of my Axolotls to put on here, but the digital camera wasmessing with me. I reccomend the link marked axolotl page over there on the left. Good pictures, good information. I have two of these things, a medium one, about 8 inches long who has hit sexual maturity (its a boy), and a smaller one, probably about 6 inches long, who has not. I call this one a "little girl" even though it could very well be a boy. Little Girl's real name is Callie, but I've called her little girl so long before I gave her a name, like I can call her Callie now. Little girl proved to be quite the lil problem, her leg got infected with fungus pretty bad. After looking them up, it turns out I cant use ANY of the anti-fungus treatments I have for my fish on axolotls. Dont use anything that contains any of these: malachite green, coper sulfate, cuperous compounds in general. I know theres other chemicals you can't use as well, but I've yet to find a page that states what they all might be. Methylene Blue is ok in low dosages. erythromycin, sodium chlorite, mercurochrome, myxazin, those are all safe things as well. Being flat broke, all I got was this cure with a tiny bit of methylene blue in a bunch of other irrelevant chemicals. This did nothing. I cut her leg off, as there wasnt anything else to do. This isnt a good idea as the fungus could reinfect even easier, but I was lucky. Her leg is growing back now. I dont have near as much to say about the big guy, who hasnt really got any name, although I'm sure ill eventually end up refering to him as "big guy". Hes a fat thing. Really fat. He ate 20 feeder goldfish in one day once. Somehow he didn't explode... I no longer put that many in there at one time. Next time he just might pop. I guess other general info about these guys, they are meat eaters, I feed them a varaty of things, mostly goldfish and tubifex (freeze dried tubifex) I find that to get them to eat sumfin not alive, yew needa poke it in the water, keep it moving, until they eat it. They don't see too good, so the movement helps them. They eat pretty much anything, even ones that arn't big like the big guy. You realize this thing eats more then the bullhead that is almost 2 times his mass? They regenerate limbs and whatnot, they can even regenerate parts of their brain... neat eh? what really makes these guys REALLY neat, is the fact they are salamanders that remain in their larval stage, unless induced out of it, but thats not a normal thing. They hit sexual maturity in thier larval stage. If you dont know, larval stage just means they have gills, gives them this lion like look. All the pics i've found are really pretty ones, that must have been specially bred, all the ones I've seen alive were just grey. If you are actually intrestested in these critters, I'd check out the links to the left, they are where the majority of my information came from. |