Question: Itchy gills....??!!

Hey, i need a little help, im awfully confused.... My Axie Nigel seems to have either itchy or really irritating gills all of a sudden... It comes and goes in little bouts. Starts with him flicking them really violently, then he will start thrashing around the tank. he bangs his head on the tank when he does this too! I noticed yesterday that when he does this, he is reaching round with his back feet and scratching at his gills... i dont know whats wrong, and im really worried!! can any one give me a clue??

Do a check on your water readings, especially ammonia.

i saw mine a few times doing something that looked like "trying to scratch his gills", actually he lost his left side gills when he was little, i guess some mate bit them off and they didnt grow up

it was awful to see it, he was like twitching, trying to reach his gills with his hind foot, is that what your does?
mine didnt bump his head but the movements were very strange, like spasmodic... i changed his tank a while ago and i didnt see him doing it again, actually he's been very very quiet in his new tank, he used to swim a lot in the small tank and now he's at the bottom and hardly swims around

when he did this i checked the water and everything was fine, i didnt see any reason for this behaviour really... at some point i thought maybe the gills were regenerating and somehow that produced some itch...

is yours doing it all the time? anything in the tank that may have hurt him? a stone or a fake plant?

yeh, thats exactly what it looks like.... he does it every half hour or so... there is nothing in the tank that could hurt him, he only has his hidey hole, and that doesnt have any hard surfaces, or corners or anything... i have checked the water, and all seems fine there... i have noticed that the most of the frills on 2 of his gills are missing, and those gills seem a little paler than the others too. and his mood has changed, he is miserable. used to swim around a lot, but now he just sits in the corner of his tank. i was worried he may be metamorphosing but i dont know what to look for in that....

ummm about the pale gills, mine is a gold albino and during the day his gills are paler, when he is more active and eating the gills get more reddish, i think it's normal..

is he eating? what do you feed him?
how big is the axie? and the tank?

How often do you do water changes (and how large)? And how large is the tank?

His tank is 120cm long x 31cm wide x 38cm tall. the water is 20cm deep. he is 20cm long. i do a 20% change once a week, twice if he's extra mucky. he doesnt seem interested in his food so much over the past week. i feed him blood worm cubes. i dropped one in yesterday and he doesnt seem to have touched it since.... oh, i dont know what to do!!

The cube has been sitting there for a day? You need to be siphoning out the tank much sooner if he doesn't eat his food. The food sitting there for a long time is going to release a lot of ammonia into your tank. How often do you clean the waste/uneaten food out?

And do you have a reading of your water parameters?

Yes, i am a nurse, i work nights at the hospital. i dropped one in yesterday (last night) and when i came home from work, he doesnt seem to have touched it. as i said earlier, my water ph levels are fine. one of the first things i checked, of course... and am checking daily. i clean his watse daily. i have kept Axies for 9 years now, and i havent seen this before...

i have read once that someone fed a big earthworm to an axie and then it got out from his gills, when mine started scratching i thought that maybe it was due to an earthworm or food maybe getting stuck somewhere there and he was trying to "clean" it.... is it possible that the bloodworms get somewhere around his gills on the inside and that may cause distress for a while??

for how long has it been doing it? have you tried feeding it something other than bloodworm?

he's been doing it for 3 days now... i cant find any good feedback on any other food to be feeding him, and all my other axies have never had a problem with the blood worms...

i give him reptomin sticks and earthworms, i think they're ok but the sticks float so it takes a while for the axie to catch them all
the earthworms are easier to feed, i cut them and throw them at his head or very close so usually he can catch them, if they fall to the bottom he doesnt get them so i have to get them out, that's the worse part...

maybe try to offer the axie something different to see if it eats and how it goes

have you tried earthworms?