My axie passed away...how to prepare the tank for a new one?

Some of you may have seen my thread in the other forum, unfortunately, I lost my beloved axolotl to a fungus infection, despite my best efforts to treat him.

for the past week before his death, he was in the fridge, my question is, the tank, which is still up and running, and completely cycled, is there anything I need to do to prepare it for my next axie? ie, treat it with some-sort of anti-fungal treatment? or should I be good to go?

I'm not as expert on the medical aspects as I am the water quality topics, so I'll leave it to someone else to comment regarding the fungus in the water. (My thought on that is that fungal spores are always present, and so as long as the water is not dirty, and that was not the cause of the fungal infection, it should probably be ok. I'm sure if I'm wrong, someone else will help correct me.)

What I did want to chime in to say was that, the longer the tank is uninhabited, the less cycled your tank will become. Basically, the size of the beneficial bacteria population depends on the amount of waste in the tank producing ammonia (which feeds one type of bacteria that converts it to NO2, and another type of bacteria that converts NO2 to NO3.) If you do keep the tank up and running for a while, and add an axolotl later, it might be worth adding a small amount of food every other, or every other day, and leaving it to decompose for a while (I would remove it if you see enough in there that it's visibly getting gross), in order to keep the beneficial bacteria alive over the next few weeks. Then, before, and for a while after, getting a new axolotl, test the water daily, as though it were a newly cycling tank, just in case there is any lag. (i.e., if the axolotl is producing more waste than your added food was over the last few weeks, there may not yet be enough beneficial bacteria at first to break all of it down into safer nitrates, so you may need to do daily water changes for a little while.)

This all depends on how long the tank is left empty, but I thought I'd throw it out there for you to consider.

Could you post a picture of your tank?

thanks for the advice, I bit the bullet today and bought a new axolotl, a nice albino one, a fairly big one too and I suspect its mature already, as it has the dark tips on its toes, I have yet to determine what gender it is yet.

the tank was without a axolotl for a week but I kept the filter running, and the plants still in the tank, and the lights cycling on and off as usual, as I treated the water with a anti fungus treatment, labeled to be safe for amphibians, but I did a 100% water change before adding my new axie to be sure.

I'll just have to keep a eye on the water peramiters to be sure, thanks for the advice.

iChris said:

I bit the bullet today and bought a new axolotl, a nice albino one,

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Sounds lovely! I'm on the look out for an true albino (I've got a leucistic) but can't seem to find them anywhere. And my wife would kill me if I came home with another one.

I got to choose between a albino one, or this other one, I was not sure what it was, it was not a wild type, it was sort of a dirty yellow color, like the color of that building sand, I opted for the albino because he has nice flowing gills.