losfrijoles
New member
My wife and I have been taking care of our axolotl for a little over a year now. She is a rescue and we have no idea how old she is. She's just under a foot long.
Recently she has been getting white fuzz in her gills every couple weeks. This has been a problem since we got her, but there are times when she's gone a few months without an issue. It's now occurring quite often. In the past we've researched on this forum and others, coming to the conclusion that it's likely fungus. We give her a few salt baths (every 12 hours, 1tbsp of salt in 3L of water) and usually it clears up. This last time it ended up on both sides of her and we've now put her the fridge to regenerate, since her gills were looking really thin. She's good at hiding it sometimes so it gets farther than we'd like, but we either see it outright or notice when she starts scratching or crams herself inside the more rocky "toys" in her tank and starts spinning around.
What we were wondering is: is this actually fungus? And, what can we do to prevent this from happening again? She seems so miserable when this happens.
Our care so far has been: We change half her water every week or so, sooner if she poops. Her 20gal tank has a Whisper 10-30 cartridge filter and a peltier cooling system that keeps it between 19C-20C. We're in Texas in a top-floor apartment; it gets warm. Our house temperature is 23C-26C depending on the day. I plan to thoroughly clean the cooling block while she's out of the tank since it seems to be less effective than it was (we used to be able to get down to 17C). If that fails to lower the temperature further then we'll probably get a second cooler. We'd like to put her in a bigger tank, but we don't have the space for that at the moment and purchasing a correspondingly sized cooler is somewhat expensive. We took out her substrate some time ago to aid in cleaning, but we do still occasionally have issues with a layer forming on the top of the tank. We have a surface skimmer, but it heats up the tank while its running.
Here are some pictures (pretty hi-res, click to embiggen). Here she is on a good day:
Here is her latest measurement:
And here are the pictures of her latest fuzz (she got a lot off in the salt bath before we took this picture):
Look how sad she is!
Recently she has been getting white fuzz in her gills every couple weeks. This has been a problem since we got her, but there are times when she's gone a few months without an issue. It's now occurring quite often. In the past we've researched on this forum and others, coming to the conclusion that it's likely fungus. We give her a few salt baths (every 12 hours, 1tbsp of salt in 3L of water) and usually it clears up. This last time it ended up on both sides of her and we've now put her the fridge to regenerate, since her gills were looking really thin. She's good at hiding it sometimes so it gets farther than we'd like, but we either see it outright or notice when she starts scratching or crams herself inside the more rocky "toys" in her tank and starts spinning around.
What we were wondering is: is this actually fungus? And, what can we do to prevent this from happening again? She seems so miserable when this happens.
Our care so far has been: We change half her water every week or so, sooner if she poops. Her 20gal tank has a Whisper 10-30 cartridge filter and a peltier cooling system that keeps it between 19C-20C. We're in Texas in a top-floor apartment; it gets warm. Our house temperature is 23C-26C depending on the day. I plan to thoroughly clean the cooling block while she's out of the tank since it seems to be less effective than it was (we used to be able to get down to 17C). If that fails to lower the temperature further then we'll probably get a second cooler. We'd like to put her in a bigger tank, but we don't have the space for that at the moment and purchasing a correspondingly sized cooler is somewhat expensive. We took out her substrate some time ago to aid in cleaning, but we do still occasionally have issues with a layer forming on the top of the tank. We have a surface skimmer, but it heats up the tank while its running.
Here are some pictures (pretty hi-res, click to embiggen). Here she is on a good day:
Here is her latest measurement:
And here are the pictures of her latest fuzz (she got a lot off in the salt bath before we took this picture):
Look how sad she is!