The long awaited Petrie

Ok, so I finally got my axie - he is around 9 months old and his previous owner needed him to be rehomed.

Will attach a couple of pics - can people please let me know their opinion and let me know if he looks healthy - I think he does, but all my knowledge is based on theory and other people's pics and advice - this is the first time it's been put into practise.

He is eating well and has so far been sampling frozen bloodworms and live earthworms - he seems very keen on both.

His spray bar is working a treat, the water hardly moves, temp is at 19C and water tests are good (ammonia and nitrite are both 0, nitrate is at 10, PH at 7.5).

One of the things I am curious about, is that Petrie seems to flick his gills back every 10 seconds or so. I understand this may be to oxygenate? He has lots of live plants in his tank, so it should be well oxygenated, I'd have thought? It there anything else I should do? He seems very calm and chilled out, happy to just lounge about and his tail tip isn't curled at all. And he is a greedy, little menace, so appetite is fine!

So anyway, without further ado, I give you Petrie :happy:

He is lovely and I am very very jealous!

Welcome Petrie!

He looks perfectly healthy to me, Zoe.

I love that 'peekaboo' picture .

He is precious <3 Looks healthy and playful. It's nice you were able to give him a home.

Be careful with the sand substrate they can eat and and cause impaction.

I think the majority of axolotl owners here agree that sand as a substrate is not a problem and so far I have not heard of an axolotl getting an impaction problem from sand.

Oh okay, nevermind then, that is good to know.

Very nice,Petrie looks great :happy:

Thank you very much everyone for all the nice comments. He seems to be getting on really well, lies about all placid most of the time, then, after a couple of hours, he'll creep a couple of inches forward or occasionally,he'll turn round - odd, because when he turns round, it seems to confuse him, because a minute later, he'll turn round again and then again and again. Maybe he's just got a very short attention span!

He seems happy in his tank, though he doesn't seem that interested in the mangrove root thingy (if anyone remembers this from the photos of his tank in another thread) - he spends all of his time either behind a bit of driftwood (a new addition since the tank pics were taken), flumping across the plants in the middle of the tank (I'm sure he's trying to pull them out!!) or in the half log - whenever he goes near the mangrove root, he'll walk into it and then, rather and try and walk through the gaps, he'll just give up and go elsewhere! I was hoping he'd perch on top of it like Jacq suggested, but not yet .

But yes, generally quite lazy - once he swam up to the spray bar and swam against the current for a few seconds, which looked hilarious - I believe he may have thought the motion was dinner of some sort!

Aiming to get new lighting tomorrow (I WILL have my purple, jungle-like tank, I MUST!), so will put up some more pics soon.

Zoe x