Question: Baby Death :(

Hello, I just went through a bit of a tragedy. After two weeks, I lost all of my Axolotl babies. I was wanting to get a little information from everyone out there. First off I had my babies in a 29g, no heater and ran off of a sponge filter. The babies did awesome, hatched out and I had three different batches of baby brine hatching out. I was feeding brine twice a day to the tank and doing a 25% water change every 2-3 days. Everyone was doing well until about the two week mark. Does anyone have ANY ideas??? I think our female is about to pop out some more eggs and I really want to be successful this time. Thank you!

Was your water conditioned? Do you know the parameters?

And that's a lot of space to be trying to feed baby axolotls BBS...perhaps they starved from not being able to catch/eat the food?

I'm not sure on what the water condition were, it was a cycled tank with a sand bottom that I had them in.
What size tank do you suggest for them?
I was thinking of hatching them in a bigger tank them moving them to a smaller tanks after they hatch. I think it will be easier to clean out the leftover egg mucus that way.

Small tupperware containers are fine and are what most people use when rearing young axolotls. Just keep the water fresh and the axolotls will have an easier time eating.

No air stones or anything? Just changing out the water every other day or so?

Yeah, the oxygen from the water changes is enough.

how often do you suggest feeding?

daily. check here if you haven't already : Axolotls - Rearing from Egg to Adult

edit: and how do you know the tank was cycled prior to placing the larvae in there?

The tank I put the babies into I had running with white cloud minnows. When the eggs were put into the tank, my nitrate level was perfect. I am just not sure what the level was after the two week mark.

Awesome! Thank you for the info. I will be doing some more reading now.

I have to admit I was a bit pessimistic about the scheme of putting larval axies into small tupperware containers but I had absolutely no losses doing it this way. I was quite surprised at how hardy these animals are. I did feed them twice daily for about three weeks, made sure I rinsed the newly hatched brine shrimps before adding them to the small containers and did water changes every three or four days. They did very well and I didn't encounter any problems with water quality (I had about .75 to 1 L of water in each container and only one larva) until I changed to feeding them prepared shrimp (Instant Ocean Soft Gel Brine Shrimp). The food was easier to feed but, boy, did it make the water messy!

I raised mine in quite shallow trays. I fed them twice daily the brine shrimp and transferred the larvae to clean trays after each feed- that is until I fed daphnia, Then the water changes where once a day. Do watch the temperatures of the water though.
In the future, if I raise another batch I aim to raise them in an outdoor tub, filled with daphnia .

Does anyone have any suggestions on hatching out the baby brine? All I did last time is used three 5 gallon buckets, ran large air stones in and dumped the eggs in. Over top was a 30 inch florescent light. Is there an easier way to hatch enough to feed all the babies?

You seem to do everything on a large scale...again...use SMALL containers so it is easier to catch the BBS. Hatch them in small containers and when you want to collect them, put a light (flash light for example) at one of the BBS container and they will move towards the light making them easier to collect and distribute to your Axies.

To feed 18 axie larvae I use a 20 oz soda bottle with the bottom cut off and an airline inserted through a hole in the cap. I hang this bottle from a rack and run air through the airline to keep the eggs moving. I place this hanging bottle near a table lamp to keep the water around 80 degrees F. I use a quarter teaspoon of eggs and this amount of shrimps lasts about two days. After the last feeding I reset the bottle and the newly hatched shrimps are ready the next time I need some (overnight). Obviously you can scale this set up to fit your needs - ie - use 2 L soda bottles, etc. Make sure to place the air pump higher than the bottle so that a power failure doesn't result in water running back into the pump.

I'm so sorry you lost your little ones, so sad

I must be lazy I don't bother cutting the bottom off the soda bottle and inverting it. All I do is make a hole in the lid a little larger than the air tube so the air can escape, fill with water add marine aquarium salt (if you don't have any then use table salt with a little bicarb soda) add the eggs put the lid back on, feed the tube into the bottle through the hole to almost the bottom. You just have to make sure all the eggs are constantly moving. Sit it on the window behind our tank and harvest them as we need them by disconnecting the airtube from the air pump, leave it sit so the shells separate and float to the top then use the tube to siphon the shrimp out of the bottle and into a very fine net just like I would to do a water change and if you want you can pour the drained water back into the bottle but it's not necessary.

If it's really cold you might want to consider a heat source like sitting it on top of the aquarium lights or something.

I have my baby in an isolation net within a larger tank. Pull him out and into a plastic container to feed an put him back when he's finished. Keeps the BBS out of his home and the larger volume of water means it is much more stable and you don't need to change the water as often

Some pics.
1. One of our hatcheries
2. Where we keep them to hatch them (takes between 12 and 24 hours at the moment)
3. We run both hatcheries AND the axie tank airstone off the same pump using T connectors with the screw in flow adjusters built into them so we can turn off one or turn them up and down as needed. You can just see a white joiner between the tanks
4. This is where the baby lives. he shares his home with 5 baby guppies, 2 Yabbies and 2 freshwater mussels all outside of his little net of course

MereB - nice looking planted aquaria. Also, you have an interesting assortment of critters in with your baby axie. I believe you guys are referring to what we Yanks call a crawdad when you say "yabbie", right?

bayhicoach said:

MereB - nice looking planted aquaria. Also, you have an interesting assortment of critters in with your baby axie. I believe you guys are referring to what we Yanks call a crawdad when you say "yabbie", right?

Click to expand...

Thank you. It came out nicely
Yep it's a regular zoo over here LOL
:happy: Almost a crawdad. They look very similar and there are some very distinct biological/biophysical differences if you know what you're looking for. If you don't know then yeah pretty much.
I've also heard people call them, crawbobs and marron but marron tend to be larger and BLUE :lol: Depends where you grew up I guess.
I grew up catching Yabbies and crawbobs (smaller than yabbies) in the river that ran across my parents property while hubby grew up with crawdads, yabbies and marron and that's just from one side of Australia to the other :rofl: Heaven only knows how may OTHER names are out there for them.

Thank you EVERYONE! This gives me some new great ideas and my female just laid eggs again last night. I am excited to try this again and hopefully will be successful this time. Thank you again for all your help.

If everything goes well it will also give me hope for when my Andersonii and GFP Axolotls are ready for breading. YAY!

Do you keep the lid off the containers