Illness/Sickness: Unbalanced floater, curled tail.

[Vicious Puffer]

I posted a similar thread recently about my jeuvenile leucistic axolotl floating. It had me a little worried at the time, since it lasted about two days, but then she took back to diving and swimming around the bottom and in her hiding spot.
But a few days ago (I want to say four or five) She started floating again, and hasn't gone back down. She seems to be getting wobbly and having trouble with balancing. Today I founder her on her side, and panicked, thinking she may be dead. However upon nudging her gently with her feeding tongs, she began to thrash about. I've noticed her tail seems to have a curl to it when left alone, but it isn't entilrely constant. I've secluded her to a small container (one of those plastic critter totes) and am preparing to fridge her.
We have a mater test kit, and nothing seems amiss with the water quality, and our substrate is sand, so I'm ruling both of those out.

Does anyone have an idea of what may be wrong, an any tips of how I ought go about fixing it?

 

[Bellabelloo]

What are you feeding her?

 

[Vicious Puffer]

Primarily bloodworms, with the occiaonal small guppy (Neither of my lotls are great hunters, so usually I offer them with chopsticks. Earthworms are a little on the large side, so I haven't yet tried. She's not fond of any sort of pellet, really, so It's been a rather limited.

 

[dragonlady]

How big is she? I wonder (if she's really small) if she may have swallowed some sand and have an impaction. I would say that you are on the right track with the fridging. Just make sure that the water is low enough that she can touch the bottom (to decrease the stress) and still keep her body covered.

Be very careful offering feeder fish of any kind as they could be carrying disease. Any feeders such as this should be quarantined for at least 30 days unless they were from your own stock.

 

[Vicious Puffer]

Sorry I didn't respond very immediately, but I did take your advice and lowered the water level. It seemed to help, and she's doing better now.
She's about 8-9 centimeters (so obviously I'm not positive she is in fact a 'she')

I keep my feeder fish in pretty good condition, and get them from a fairly reliable source (a small pet store that breeds their own livebearers) I know that doesn't completely eliminate the risk, and I've only done so a few times.

I'm wondering, with nightcrawlers, do you think that the ones gotten from bait shops or walmart are likely to be safe? I worry, because they're meant to catch fish, not successfully sustain them, so I feel it could be risky...

 

[animalloversfb]

Walmart sells "Trout Worms" which are earthworms - you could cut them up and feed those They really do love them - rinse them well after cutting though. I don't think they use anything harmful to raise them as if the fish did eat it, then it could be harmful to humans to consume and many people do "catch and release" and would not want to harm the fish for that either...they were recommend on this forum as a source...