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Interestig coloured axolotl

yellowpebble

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I have been raising a special little axolotl we named Moon Landing. He started out as a larvae looking half Wild Type half Leucistic, but has grown up to have a very interesting pattern.

His parents were my first two axolotls from the same pet store about 7 months ago, a very dark Wild Type female and a sandy yellow Copper male, copper being believed to be a Tyrosinase positive albino.

I was never interested in breeding, and that is why I bought two “females”. They bred unexpectedly about a month after they had settled in, which is when I discovered the copper must be a male because the wild type was laying the eggs. I was excited about the eggs and decided to raise all 300 of them (which I am never doing again!). Out of the 300, I had two special looking ones, with one side a dark colour and the other side white. One of these was a spinner and died about a month after he was born, unexpectedly, because he was eating and growing like the others.

The other named Moon Landing stayed strong, and is about 7-8cm now, the same size as most of his siblings. There were a few tiny ones in the batch too, who have never grown past the 3 cm mark, although I think they are growing very slowly.

Moon landing started of split - half Wild and half Lucistic down the middle, right from when he/she hatched. As he has grown, some of the pigment from his dark side has moved over to the lighter side, creating a saddle across his back. White patches from the light side of his tail seemed to have moved to the darker side, and now he has a mostly white tail on both sides, with a few dark patches. His head and tail on the lighter side have stayed white/pink like a Leucistic. One side of his gills are pink while the others on the darker side are longer and brown. Both of his eyes are dark, but look similar to the copper eyes of his siblings, which seem to have a larger shiny ring compared to the wild types. His colour has been stable over the last few months and it looks like his odd colouring will stay. As he is growing however, the dark side is becoming lighter and patchier. There are noticeable patches of what looks like copper or golden albino mixed with patches of wild type, and the odd white spot.

The rest of the batch was about 40% wild type, 30% copper and 30% golden albino. The wild types are half very dark with dark gills like the mother, and the other half are a light spotty green with red gills. I find it interesting that there was no Leucistic or White Albino expressed in this batch considering Moon Landing has white parts. I have bred the two parents again and gave the eggs away however, and I have been told that there was a very small percentage of White Albinos in the second batch.

I do not know the exact genetics of the parents because they came from the pet store but from the 300 babies we can summarise that the Wild Type parent must be heterozygous for Albino, and that the Copper must be homozygous for Albino. There also must be a White Albino gene lurking there too, which if you think the odd colouration is genetic, must have been expressed in Moon Landing. I think there is a high chance that the parents are related, considering they were together at the pet store, around the same size, and were shipped from the same supplier at the same time. This might heighten the chances of a genetic colour mutation.

I have not done any genetic experimentation, but I plan to breed Moon Landing when he/she is mature, to see if he can pass on his genes. Even if it is genetic, the chances for such an odd axolotl are so slim we might never know if it is genetic or not, because even if it is, it might not be expressed in the offspring.


Here are some pictures, he is about 6 months old now.


let me know what you think!


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Molch

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could it be a chimera, an individual spliced together from two fertilized eggs that merged and therefore representing two genotypes in one individual? Sort of the opposite of identical twins.

I've heard of such a thing in other taxa. There's a quarter horse stallion out there somewhere that is a proven chimera. I don't know if it occurs in axies, however.
 

Niels D

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haha, i have no clue what the german sais, but i'm enjoying the pictures :D

Both parents were wild type, though one was paler than the other. The chimera was bigger than the other larvae, straight from the beginning. After some time there was only one brother/sister as big as the chimera, all the others were smaller. He was big enough to eat one of his brothers/sisters at one time. The head of the chimera is big in comparison to his body. My German isn't that good, but I can understand most of it.
 

yellowpebble

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he is forming definate large patches of yellow, brown and white. Its quite odd like he is a morph of 3 colours.
 
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