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sarah
Guest
I think that if you are interested in feeding feeder fish to your axolotls you just have to go about it the right way. Not as a staple, but a few times a week or a small fish a day with their other foods, would probably be best. I have several tanks that contain different things, such as feeder fish, tropical fish, axolotls, etc. My husband and I also have a "hospital" tank in which we treat sick fish when the need arises. Mostly it is used for quarantining new additions to our collection, such as newly purchased feeder fish. Once they have completed about 2 weeks of treatment in the "hospital", they are ready to join their brethren before being sacrificed to Xolotl. Our axolotls are not good hunters. When we feed them fish, we just hold them by their tail fins and lead them to their doom. We use Rosey Reds, a type of minnow. They cost roughly the same as guppies (depending on where you buy them), but are more suitably sized for adult axolotls (in my opinion). I can't imagine trying to hang on to a guppy, they seem a bit small. I would recommend buying your starting feeder fish from a pet store rather than a bait shop, as pet store fish probably have less of a chance of having parasites/diseases than bait shops. And if your feeders happen to breed and spawn, yippee, less to buy! Rosey Reds are sometimes grouped near, or mis-labeled as, goldfish. Also, they are a cold water fish, not tropical, so I feel like they are closer to something a wild axolotl would or would have consumed. We basically try to mimic the same types of food sources for our axolotls that they would come across in their natural habitat, or what's left of it.