Uuuuuuh, no. ;)

[karipatra]

Woke up this morning to introduce my oldest aka 3 day old axie to his first food. Moved him to the feeding container after the brine shrimp had been put in and waited for the action to start!

He started twitching and moving and I was SO excited he/she was eating, but couldn't see anything really well.

Grabbed my magnifying glass and saw this : "Hey! Don't touch me! ACK! Get off my gills! Hey! That's my tail! No touchy!" LOL

This went on for 5-10 minutes. Sigh. Guess he/ she isn't quite ready for solid food. I'll try again tomorrow!

 

[SuperSteve]

Was it baby brine shrimp? Adult ones would be too big. I couldn't see mine feeding for the first week so just decided to feed them on microworms till they were a bit bigger When they eventually started to eat proper live food it's cool to watch the food travel through the digestive system

 

[Axolotl4life]

Uh oh indeed! Lol, I've never looked at my newborns feeding with a magnifying glass before. I too used to move my larvae into a feeding container. I've stopped this method however. I was fearful the BBS that were not eaten would deteriorate the water quality too quickly. But moving the babies from one tank to a feeding tank once or twice a day became too much of a burden. My whole idea of using a separate feeding container was to avoid doing as frequent water changes. But I am a believer now of daily water changes. I've found its a bit less of juggling items around in my fish room. It sounds like you're on the right track, but I just wanted to make sure you're rinsing your BBS thoroughly with freshwater before they are introduced to your babies. If possible, pick up some frozen BBS or cyclops cubes as precaution/emergency food for if the BBS ever die off all of a sudden in your hatcheries. I've found that newborns will eat both of these foods soon after hatching but wouldn't rely on them as a staple by any means, just back up. Good luck to you!

 

[karipatra]

Hey all!

Yes, they were newly hatched BBS, rinsed off well, and it appeared he wasn't ready yet, which is fine.

But this does bring up a different question: how do you know for sure that you have the water totally changed? You'd have to move the little ones to a new container while you did that anyway, right?

I was extremely careful about sucking, with an eye dropper, all of the BBS out of the spoon he was in before placing back in his container.

 

[Axolotl4life]

I use a turkey baster to remove waste. In my half gallon tanks I take out about half the water and replace it with fresh(de-chlorinated) water. In larger tanks, say 6-8 gallons, I just remove all the waste I can see. I only remove my little guys once a week when I thoroughly scrub out their tanks.

Be careful with the turkey baster however, just the other night I sucked up one of my leucistic larvae because I thought his two little eyes were specks of debris, and I couldn't see his body at all despite being about an inch long lol.

 

[Kaysie]

Get two tupperwares. Turkey baster out the vast majority of the water, then dump the larva into the clean, new tupperware. Rub off the slime and rinse the old container for next time. Voila, 100% water change.

 

[Kerry M]

Or you could tip all the larvae in a net, submerge the net in a bowl of clean declorinated tap water and wriggle it to release any trapped BBS, then transfer the net and larvae into the second container of declorinated tap water. Larvae are quite resilient little guys.