lumpydude
New member
Hi, my partner and I adopted a 3yo axolotl named Ziggy about a year ago, and then we recently moved to a different water district. About a month after our move, I began to notice some unusual behavior. Ziggy started refusing food, and spending much more time floating on top of the water, swimming frantically, and trying to wedge himself into hiding places. I tested the water and found that our pH was significantly higher, and that our ammonia levels had spiked. We were already treating our water with API Water Conditioner and pH Down, but I started doing more frequent water changes and added a little more pH Down with each one until the pH was corrected, but after several water changes our ammonia levels were still too high. It seemed likely that our nitrogen cycle had crashed somehow. I bought some API Quick Start to reintroduce nitrifying bacteria to our system. I started slowly, adding 5ml to our 20 gal tank, then increasing by 5ml each water change until I added 20 ml on our last one. This took about a week, and our ammonia levels seemed to finally return to normal. But after the last water change, Ziggy’s behavior took a distressing turn for the worse. He started floating in a much more lethargic way and was unresponsive even when poked. We have a chiller and we usually keep our tank between 60-64F, but I decided to drop the temp to 48-52F to attempt fridging. We’ve been fridging for about 5 days now. This seems to have been helpful, Ziggy is no longer floating and is now accepting small bits of food nearly every day, but I am still confused as to what caused this and where to go from here. The last water change seemed to have a very negative effect, is there something in our water that we’re not testing for? Did I overdo the nitrifying bacteria? Our last water test results were pH 7.4, Nitrites 0ppm, Nitrates 10ppm, Ammonia 0ppm. We feed Ziggy red wrigglers, he was previously eating about a half a worm a day.
