What have you feed your axi babies?

I have read through ALOT of post on this forum~ love this site btw very informative nice group of ppl~ i've read a many horror stories of bbs gone wrong and intresting tid bits of different foods to offer our new little offsprings~ what worked best for you? Ive only raised 28 eggs and had only 2 make it to juvies.. im scared to try again being how hard and painstaking it was before.. the only time i used bloodworms from the get go, cut them up into itty bitty peices, and feed them with a eye dropper.. most of them made it past the grew all limbs phase, i think what got most of them was the way i had them in lil cubicles of water and wasnt giving enough fresh water and was my downfall bc i was so scared of them biting and eating one another.. but i would love to hear of other stories and their odd ball way of feeding.. im scared of the bbs way due to im sure u would mess it up with not rinsing properly or some weird mishap. i just introduced what i though were 2 male juvies with my adults and found out a week later that one is indeed a femal and now have over 150+ eggs that im not sure what to do with, i have been trying to rehome them local but not many are aware of them let alone how to care for babies. i wouldnt mind the shipping them but im unfimilar with this process as well. but anyhoo~ please share your rearing stories

As newly borns they should be fed baby brine shrimp that has been thoroughly rinsed under fresh water. As they grow bigger you can move them onto bloodworms and blackworms and as soon as their big enough to take chopped up earthworms I would suggest moving them ASAP as they are the most nutritionally balanced or feed them baby earthworms. I fed my 3" juveniles on earthworms with no problems as long as their small enough.

I fed my hatchlings grindal worms from the start. Very easy

oh never heard of these~ please tell me more about them~ how / where u get them and how u feed them to the axies

I ordered an established culture from a great seller in ny. Found the listing in the live food section of AquaBid website.
I scoop out a small amount of worms from where they are massed around their food, put into a black container of some sort(so you can easily see the tiny white worms). Then add some water and after things settle a bit, use an eye dropper or pipette to suck up worms and add to tank with hatchlings. Be sure to remove with pipette all small soil pieces that may get transferred with worms. Don't want the babies getting a blockage from 'em. And don't overfeed, because too many worms milling around can stress the little ones.

I tried daphnia but they crashed. However, many people on here have raised daphnia successfully.
Now I feed baby brine shrimp. They are quite hardy for a micro food. I just have a tank going and add eggs every couple of days and do regular cleaning of the egg shells. Living brine shrimp follow light so I just corral them that way while I siphon out eggs or to catch them in pipettes. And I keep one side of the hatchling tank lit so the BBS collect there which makes for easier cleaning. The only downside is cleaning the shrimp and having to suck up the dead ones a few hours after feeding. I just use a coffee filter rubber banded to a cup for rinsing the shrimp in dechlorinated water (I do 2-3 rinsing a by filling the filter with the freshwater and letting it drain then repeating). I am brand new to this too but still have 6 of the 8 that hatched. And the two I lost were deformed. Hoping to switch to (chopped or small) blackworms soon and have heard of people using those from hatching too.
Best of luck!

I fed my babies BBS. The only issues I can imagine having with BBS are making sure you don't get the egg shells mixed in with the shrimp, rinsing them thoroughly, or having your culture crash.

I bypassed the first issue by buying decapsulated for-hatching eggs. They're slightly more difficult to find,but definitely worth the cost and effort, in my opinion. You still have some eggshells at the bottom of your hatchery, but you don't have to worry about any of them floating around the surface, making harvesting much easier.

As far as rinsing, I would put the bbs directly into a plastic soda bottle with the top cut off and upturned, a coffee filter placed inside it. Let the salty water filter out, then rinse them with fresh water two or three times before putting them in the food container. Never missed a step, never mixed saltwater into the freshwater.

I did have my culture crash once in the very beginning, but luckily bbs hatch so quickly that I had at least a little bit of food for the babies by the next day. I was raising around 100 axolotls, so I had three 3liter hatcheries going at once. I would stagger the cultures so that on any given day I had a good harvest from at least one of the hatcheries, but usually two.

As the babies grew bigger, I began introducing bloodworms to the bigger guys, and fed them a mixture of bbs and bloodworms. When they got bigger still, I switched them just to bloodworms, and now they're on a combination of pellets and bloodworms.


I was initially afraid of brine shrimp too, because the thought of raising them in saltwater was intimidating and seemed tedious, but honestly it was quite easy once I got the hang of it. They're much easier to set up and maintain than daphnia, and if you have a crash, they'll reboot again relatively quickly. Just make sure their water is warm.

I put a bucket out in my back yard and let the mosquitoes lay their eggs then later i just scooped them up and gave them to my babies.

Walkebra000 said:

I put a bucket out in my back yard and let the mosquitoes lay their eggs then later i just scooped them up and gave them to my babies.

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I'd be worried about diseases or parasites from that, plus it doesn't seem like a steady food source.

The ones I had did well on microworms and brine shrimp.

5 of my 30 babies died within 48 hours, but since then only one more died and it had a deformity. I raised them all together in a 2 gallon critter cage at first, then moved to a 20 gallon long. They have always had a sponge filter and at least every other day water changes. They have plenty of hiding places too. Most of them are fully intact. I am paranoid about them canabalizing each other, but they do pretty good. They are almost 3 inches now.
I started feeding my larvae baby daphnia and baby brine shrimp. With the daphnia I just stocked the hatchling tank with adult daphnia and put in a sponge filter for circulation, The daphnia reproduced quickly and stayed alive in the water until eaten. (But I think they were to big for the newly hatched larvae so I started feeding the BBS.)
The BBS were easy enough to hatch, clean and feed to the hatchlings, but messy. You have to be careful not to overfeed, and clean up afterward. after about two weeks my babies were big enough to eat most of the daphnia. so I quit hatching the BBS.
I realy liked the fact that I did not need to vac out the tank after every feeding of daphnia.
However, my main culture has crashed several times, dispite my best efforts. I got lucky, though, my mother's pond has a very healthy amount of micro-bugs, So I could keep feeding them. By one month old I was feed about 300-400 daphnia at least 1-2 times per day!
At about 1.5 inches long I introduced them to blood worms. It took about 3 days to get them all to accept it. I had to put the smallest 3 back into the 2 gallon critter tank and kept feeding them daphnia for about a week longer than the rest.
At 2.5-3 inches they are starting to eat small red wigglers and cut up earthworms. I love seeing how excited they get when they smell them in the water!
Good luck! Hope this helps.