Video: Tiger Salamander Larvae Feeding

[John]

I was bored tonight so I made this. It's 3 minutes of Ambystoma mavortium mavortium larvae eating frozen bloodworms. These larvae are between 9.5 and 12 cm long. The video is windows media video format so it might not be Mac friendly (sorry). Be aware that it's over 7 megabytes in size! Enjoy.

http://www.caudata.org/temp/tiger_larvae_small.wmv

 

[John]

Tell me those don't look like axolotls.

 

[ajc]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx

They look like axolotls.

 

[John]

Glad there's a mac fix for wmv. I'm about to buy a macbook and that'll come in handy I'm sure.

Regarding the axolotl look-a-likes, even in that video to my mind they appear a lot more active than axolotls. What do you think?

 

[Bellabelloo]

Enjoyed watching that...first time real player has worked for me! they look like lotties with bigger fringes....

 

[John]

Glad you liked it. One thing you might notice is that even when they get close to each other during feeding they don't lunge at each other like axolotls do occasionally. I've had these guys since Sunday and I've not seen a single lunge. That's definitely a difference from axolotls.

 

[Kaysie]

Well, when one thinks about how closely tigers are related to axolotls, it's not surprising that they look alike. I mean, they can interbreed!

 

[John]

Well, when one thinks about how closely tigers are related to axolotls, it's not surprising that they look alike. I mean, they can interbreed!

Kaysie, I believe you're thinking of Rufus Humphrey's success at hybridising an albino tiger salamander with an axolotl in the 1960s, thus leading to albino "axolotls". If memory serves, all of the eggs that were initially viable died during development or shortly after hatching (not sure which). The researchers had to take the gonad forming cells and transplant those into normals axolotls in order to reproduce the hybrid DNA. I wouldn't call that being able to interbreed.