Meet Inca :)

Hi! Sorry for the picture quality, but this is Inca Let me know what you think.

I know that the dreamstones are a little unorthodox for gravel, but I thought that seeings the other option was plain stone, I might as well let her have a pretty base with exactly the same effect of letting her walk easily.

Inca is a gorgeous colour!

Its very hard to see from the picture, but if dream stones are what I'm thinking of, you might need to remove them after all... Are they those small rounded shiny stones? An adult axie could easily swallow one of those. Try and get another picture up if you can

The dream stones are approx one inch across for the largest and the smaller ones look to be way too big for her mouth...? I'll ask my reptile shop when I go in during the week for crickets and get their opinion on whether I should get some different substrate or whether it is fine.

I'll charge up my camera and get some more photos of her for you! Thankyou for the compliment I can feel her ego from here haha

I think we can all save you the effort of asking at the shop by saying they are definitely unsuitable

It's a shame because they are beautiful, but Inca would, without doubt, be able to swallow something that size. The other option would be to get some aquarium safe glue/silicone sealant and glue them all to one another to make a mat-like arrangement.

Otherwise, I'm afraid it's too much to risk Incas life on this. We had someone on here have her axie swallow 3 huge stones (I'll dig out the link again, i did post it on another thread this week) and I think it cost several hundred dollars to have him operated on. I think the whole forum held it's breath while we waited to see if he'd even pull through!

OH NO! I'm getting the stones out right now! That's terrible! Did her axie survive?

I'm glad to read you're getting them out of her tank. It's a good idea to remove the glass stones and aything else in there that is smaller than Inca's head in any direction or she WILL swallow it and it will not be good when she does. A stone that's longer but not wider for example is still a serious risk.


Oh and to answer your question Yes the other axie did survive. They put it in the fridge post op and thought it was dead for hours. The vet's assistant not wanting to give up though brought it our and put it on her desk in it's tub of water and watched and poked it, gently of course, for a while and it sprang back to life... go figure guess it just needed to warm up a bit. Not all the stories have such happy endings though. I've read quite a few heart breakers as well and had this savior not kept trying he may never have woken up

Update on the stones:
I have gotten rid of all but the largest ones which are WAY bigger than her head and replaced them with large river stones - I really don't like sand!
As soon as they were in Inca went mad - she's been running around on them. Loves them

This is Inca's new substrate - I think it looks pretty spiffy and she seems to like it (Yes - that's the little lady on the left hand side looking out at you haha)