Melting gills

Rodney remind of which equation and I will do my best to answer.

Oops, if it s the one in the archive then I have notice an appreicable difference over a couple of weeks.lus it's not strictly an equation just my personal shorthand.
 
Cold water/loads of oxygen = less feathery gills
Warm water/less oxygen = super-feathery but also raises risk of fungus and infection.

To clear things up, I was asking about the above statement. The question was- how long does it take for the axies gill feathers to become more or less feathery when the temperature changes permanently. ie if I was keeping an axy at 12c, and the axy had fairly short gill feathers, and a week later I decided to keep the axy at 18c permanently, how long would it take for the axys gill feathers to grow to their full featheryness?
 
It doesn't really work like that. The proportion of each gill rachus won't really change (it definitely won't grow noticeably) once the larva is say, a month old or so, no matter what water you keep it in after that. The only thing that may change noticeably are the frimbriae (the little "feathers" that come off each gill rachus). You've seen Andre's photo comparison - that's a very extreme example of what can happen.

If the axolotl gets quite sick, each gill rachus might shrivel down to near nothing. If the animal does recover, they may regrow a little, but not too any great extent.
 
Thanks John. Since my axies frimbriae have shrivelled up, they have started to grow back a little. I am hoping they will grow back to their former state eventually.
 
Just an observation and not wholly unrelated:

I had my main tank temperature drop to 12C for a couple of days recently and noticed that the leucistics and albino gills completely lost all colour - the melanoid albino and leucistics went white, the two goldens went yellow. Melanoids and whildtypes remained dark coloured. I put a small heater in to lift the temp back to 18C and colour returned.

I'm guessing that blood flow was simply shut off and enough O2 was drawn through skin to satisfy their needs. I wonder if left at v cold temps for long time would have resulted in frimbriae atrophying and shrivelling up too. Anyone know?
 
Not sure, but I think they can shut off the blood flow. The other day while I was feeding, one axy snapped off 1/2 of one of the other axys rachus'. All the gills were bright red, except for the damaged one, which was completely white.
 
Terribly soft John. It could't be any worse. but I add some buffers an salts to harden it up quite often. Holtfreters a la mode if you like.
 
Soft water induces temporary anaemia at times. I would vote for that rather than the temperature being the most significant factor.
 
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