Weight and Diet

Just wondering what a roughly one year old female should look like in regards to weight?
In all the piccies of everyones axies they are SO fat by comparsion.
I have about a one year old golden albino she is kept on her own. Feed her four times a week mix of pellets (when she will accept them), freeze dried tubiflex (unfortunately her favourite food), frozen brine shrimp, dried blood worm and now once a week fresh beef heart.
She will not eat worms!! I brought a worm farm and she will not have a bar of them spits them everytime, no matter how small I cut them. I tried starving her for a few days and then giving her a worm still nothing!!.
I am not sure if I should be trying to fatten her up or something? or if she is normal. As an example of how much she is fed if she ate only freeze dried tubiflex in one feeding she would have three cubes of it.
I guess I am just not sure what is normal?

Natasha, mine are also thin compared to the ones on the forum, but I chalk that up to the fact that mine have been growing longer instead of wider. If you're really worried about it, try feeding waxworms once or twice a week, as they are quite high in fat. Also, it may be the type of worm you're feeding. Some worms have a bad taste. Try european or canadian nightcrawlers. These are not culturable at home, but are fairly cheap anyway.

Natasha - I am not sure how much she should weigh, but I am concerned about her diet. Freeze dried tubifex are not very nutritious. Even though they are her favorite, I would limit her eating them to maybe once or twice a month as a treat rather than any main part of her diet.

I too would recommend switching the type of earth worm you have been offering if that is possible.

And if you have access to black worms you might try them if she wont eat a different type of earth worm Axolotl.org says:
Blackworms, genus Lumbriculus, are an aquatic relative of earthworms. They are much thinner and smaller than earthworms, and they are a dark brown colour. They have a similarly high nutritional value to that of earthworms, making them a very good choice from that point of view. They can be cultured in captivity, but, at least in the USA, they are commonly and conveniently available in aquarium shops. Wild caught, they can pose the same disease problems as Tubifex, so again, get them from fish-free waters.

Instead of freeze dried foods of any type you might want to try frozen instead, they would be more nutritious.

You might try offering a strip of boneless fish now and then too.

Picky eaters are hard to deal with sometimes.

Rinse all blackworms thoroughly before you feed them to anything, as they are raised in a very dirty environment. This is not due to any sort of laziness on the part of the breeders, but a simple fact of how they grow best.

Brian, I think you're thinking of tubifex, not blackworms.

Natasha - I also found this at http://www.axolotl.org
One thing to bear in mind when feeding axolotls is that they need high quality foods with low oil and fat contents. They may develop liver problems if constantly fed on foods with a high oil content (Tubifex and whiteworms are a good example).

One more reason to cut back on the tubifex.

Let us know how your new food testing goes

Blackworms live in the mud and silt at the bottoms of lakes, streams, and ponds. They feed on the sludge and debris decaying at the bottom. The blackworms that are bred commercially are usually kept in conditions that, for fish, would be absolutely appalling. Shallow, warm, stagnant water with rotting vegetation. Almost no oxygen. Perfect breeding ground for blackworms and, consequently, fish diseases.

You can get clean blackworms easily though. Go to a pond, lake, or slow-moving river with a very muddy or silty bottom. Scoop up a bucket full of mud. Pack the mud into balls, and let it dry in the sun until the outer layers are dry, but the inside is still moist. The blackworms all move to the center, where the moisture is. Crack open your mud balls and collect your blackworms. Voila! Free food.

I can not get access to any other type of worm here. I am in Perth Western Australia and I can not find a single place including tackle shops, pet stores, reptile stores and garden centres that sell any other type of worm. I do know of one pet place that sells live black worm but they are so tiny and just crawl into the rocks and she does not hunt around for them. How do you feed these? do I have to remove her from her tank?
She went mad when I fed her beef heart the other night she has not had it in a long time and loved it, she even looked a bit fatter afterward. I only intend to feed it once a week or once every two weeks even.
I do not know what else to do, the only foods I have been able to track down are dried tubiflex, dried bloodworm, fresh beef heart and liver, frozen beef dinner, frozen bloodworm and brineshrimp, axolotl pellets, live blackworm and the worms she will not eat.

There's an Australian company called Pisces Inc. (?) that supplies bulk lots of worms, crickets, and a zillion other bugs. I don't have a website or a number for them though- I just remember leafing through a reptile magazine the other day and thinking "I wonder just how big your order has to be?" The ad listed some major zoos that they supply to, so it might be worth starting there? Or if you do a search for local reptile and amphibian clubs, some of the members might be able to help you with places to buy different worms?

Natasha, if you are in the Perth metro area, try Veba Pet Supplies in Zeta Cres, O'Connor. They have black worms in regularly or did have a couple of months back. Saturday mornings are usually the best time to go. They also have meal worms. When I feed black worms, I hand feed which can be messy but works. Also I am interested in where you got your axolotl as I have sold a few in the Perth Metro area?.

Regarding size, my two axys I have had for about 8 years and have only noticed over the past couple of years that they are getting good and round as opposed to long. I don't think there is a standard suffice to say that when they are sick they usually look it.

Thanks Ann-Marie I can get blackworms from the place where I brought her which was Pet City in Edgewater (Joondalup) it's in the bunnings complex on Joondalup Drive.
I hear meal worms are bad for axies? something about them not digesting the hard shell, is this correct?

You can feed mealworms to axies. Just not as a staple and before you do you need to cut their heads off.

Natasha - You are correct they can not digest the exoskeleton of meal worms.

This is from http://www.axolotl.org

I've fed mealworms to my axolotls, but the chitin (the protein that makes up the hard exoskeleton in insects) is undigestible to the axolotls. Even though I didn't feed many, the filter in-take actually started to clog with little pieces of chitin and I was still picking bits of chitin out of the filter media months afterwards. Apart from this little inconvenience, they're not a complete food, so I would only recommend them as a treat.

Since meal worms mouths can damage the axolotls insides it is suggested that you crush the meal worms mouth before feeding or as was mentioned cut the meal worms head off.