Question: Is she a white albino?

Hey, haven't checked up on this in a while. A while back, I raised 13 axolotls out of 30 eggs to maturity. Half were wild type, and began to cannibalize each other, the other half, I believe were white albino. Unfortunately, I only know the good healthy state of 4 of those 13 I raised, all of them albinos. I wanna ask to just make sure they are white albinos, after I post a picture. I was thinking about breeding the one I gave to my mother, which is a female (I think) she's pretty large and healthy. It just so happens that I work in a lab that raises daphnia and little amphipod-like shrimpy things, so it's quite tempting to want to raise some again. I was wondering what type would be the best mate for her if I wanted to go for non-wild type offspring. I do NOT want to deal with cannibalism again, it just broke my heart! Anyway, I think this girl is a white albino. I know this about her parents: mother was a luec and father was a gold albino. I may have access to one of her siblings (though not sure of the other three's sexes), but I didn't really want to inbreed, so I'd like to find a suitable mate that isn't related.

Her (Sixheart's) album is here: http://s7.photobucket.com/albums/y266/wldkiwi274/Ginui/Axies/secondbatch/sixheart/

She is white when you look at her, has red eyes, and her gill branches are iridescent. In the pics she looks a little yellowish, but I think it's just the water, when it is freshly cleaned she looks a lot more white. She's definitely not as yellow as a gold albino.

looks like a white albino to me .

Yes she is.

Regarding the cannibalism; unfortunately it will happen no matter what the parents are is the babies, but it is important to make sure that they are well fed and and not to confined. When they get larger, they should be seperated into sizes to help minimise eating each other.


Have fun!!

You are right about the wild types. Wildtype larvae have always demonstrated a higher propensity for cannibalism (even than non-wildtype siblings) in my experience. I think this is known in the scientific literature too.

kira said:

Regarding the cannibalism; unfortunately it will happen no matter what the parents are is the babies, but it is important to make sure that they are well fed and and not to confined. When they get larger, they should be seperated into sizes to help minimise eating each other.

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The way I raised them was in separate gladware containters until they were a good 3 or 4 inches or so, and I made sure that the same sizes were together. I read that it was ok to put them together again at this point. But I had also read that the wild types were aggressive towards the mutations, so I separated the albinos from wild types. Everything was fine for almost a month, then suddenly the wild types began to eat each others legs off. I had two or three deaths from injury.

All in all, it was a learning experience, but I am confident that I did everything to the best of my ability, and I think I did very well for a first try. The albinos are DEFINITELY more docile- not a single one tried to eat another one's legs off. And there were MORE of the albinos! I put so much time and care into them, I just don't want to see the wild types eat each other again. If I ended up with wild types, I would probably have to cull or ship them off to someone just to save myself the heartache after getting so attached.

Btw, I visited her three known siblings today, one was a male, two were females. It's DEFINITELY easy to tell the difference between a male and a female. I just never saw a male in person until today. So I am sure the one I gave my mom is a female now. =)