Officer Down! (help!!)

Recently, The Officer has been acting very strange....
Last night, we found a Hot Tamale that had been dropped in his tank by my boyfriends year old niece.
But it was definitely in the tank for over 3 hours.
We looked in the tank and realized that there was white goopy stuff all over the bottom of his tank.
And now all he has been doing is... sitting. Being lazy i guess but his head is cocked slightly upwards.
(he also lost part of his gill about 4 days ago)
His belly is also enlarged and lumpy on the left side.


Above view, you can kind of see his lumpy tummy :[


the way he has been sitting for the past two days


white goopys


more goopys

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

what are you water parameters?

our tank is a 10 gallon, with a filter with a sponge over it.

I think he meant the chemistry readings I hope Officer Puckles is OK! He's beautiful! The first pic just looks like he's gorged on something to me, mine get like that at times, maybe he enjoyed the tamale! What is one of them? Sounds spicy :s

officerPuckles said:

our tank is a 10 gallon, with a filter with a sponge over it.

Click to expand...

Awwww, Officer Puckles! Strangely enough, I've never heard of a Hot Tamale getting thrown in an axie tank before so I've no idea what to expect, but I suspect that you would see some sort of skin problem if it was the tamale.

Plus your first lesson in 'water parameters' heheh - We've all been here - whenever you post a poorly axie thread, the first thing you'll be asked for is your water parameters, which is things like temperature, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate readings. After a while you start posting them up in your opening post

If you don't have a test kit for the Officers water yet - get one asap. Regularly testing your water helps you understand what is going on in the tank at a much deeper level, and means you can correct problems before they become problems

what's a hot tamale?

one of my axies is always rather sedate, but Lance-Alotl is always on the go when I'm about, expecting a feed from me. I wouldn't be that worried about the laziness. its when your axie is too active you should start to be concerned.

has your tank experienced a large swing in temperature as of late?

Hot tamales are a delicious cinnimon candy.

Clean up the goop. It's probably dissolved candy. How often are you doing water changes? A 10gal is pretty small for one axolotl, so your water chemistry will get out of whack pretty quickly. How warm is your tank?

As for the lumpy belly, this has happened to mine on occasion. I think it's because of the shape of their stomach, if they eat a big meal it bulges out to one side more than the other.

I was imagining some form of taco with a million and one spicy sauces and various other things!

Me too!

Just a question: Is he still interested in food or does he keep sitting there and do nothing?

I've seen those "white goopy things" before! When our leucistic was in a tank alone, we had a fake orange plastic plant that we got in the aquirium dept of Petsmart in with him. We started seeing the white things in the bottom of the tank and couldn't figure out what was happening. Finally, we took the orange fake plant out and noticed the base (the weighted part) smelled like lemons! We did a 100% water change and the white goopy things never returned.

I'm pretty sure that the white stuff was the axolotl's skin flaking off secondary to a reaction to the chemicals being released from the plant's base (especially due to that lemony smell). I think your axolotl is having a reaction to irritating chemicals released into the water by the Hot Tamale.

yeah just change the water and scrub out the tank to get rid of any left over hot tamale candy... I imagined some sort of really hot chilli pepper