Axolotl juvie turned up/curled gills, slightly floating on one side?

[NeekaLovesYou]

Hi all,

I've been keeping a close eye on one of my juvies and decided it's time to seek advise.
About a week ago I noticed her gills were curling and turned up. Knowing this meant she was stressed out my alarm bells started ringing and I adjusted the filter. Then a thought occured to me; the filters not too powerful, has a spray bar and plants in front of it...so what's up? She has a deformed arm that points upwards and hits her gills but it's never caused her any problems and I was reassured it shouldn't. Her gills seemed to return to normal until last night - very curled up again. She was eating fine last night and I wasn't too worried as her 2 tankmates are perfectly well.

I checked her this morning and she was hiding. I thought nothing of it as she's always been quite shy compared to the others - hiding herself away, only coming out for food, until I saw her approximately an hour ago. She was at the surface of the water floating slightly to one side - I thought she had passed! I opened the hood to check and she went shooting to the bottom of the tank, then followed by swimming around frantically until hiding again.

The water quality's good and checked regularly and, like I said, her tankmates are fine.

Any ideas?

 

[NeekaLovesYou]

I've just checked on her again and shes nearer the bottom of the tank but seems to be having trouble keeping her rear end down, like she's constipated. Could that cause the side floating and turned up gills though?

 

[Kaysie]

What kind of substrate are you using? What are you feeding? How often? Have you seen poop?

 

[NeekaLovesYou]

I use very large pebbles as I have under gravel filters, fed on bloodworm, earthworm and pellets. Thankfully she's not floating today so I'm assuming she was slightly constipated as it did seem to be her rear end giving her trouble staying down. Her gills are still slightly curled though.

 

[Kaysie]

Have you checked your water quality? UG filters are notorious for trapping waste underneath them. Do you lift them to clean?

 

[NeekaLovesYou]

Yep, water qualities good; nitrates, nitrites and ammonia all at good levels I pull the filters out fortnightly to get rid of all the gunk underneath (usually just poo). Because my tanks large I've got 2 filters in there (designed specifically to be this way for the tanks size) one at each end with the trays underneath, obviously. Both have spray bars and plants in the way so I thought there was no way she could have stress until I accidently unplugged one of them and her gill curling pretty much rectified itself. What should I do with the filter though? I've taken it out but i've never had problems with them both running before - They don't cause a current/ rapid water flow.