Illness/Sickness: Young axolotl died (of fungus infection?)

[ReginaSimone]

Hi everyone!

Newbie owner from Belgium here. We got twee axies end of november for our daughter. In the store they said, keeping them is soooo easy, but I disagree.

I noticed white furry (moldy) spots on Sita's skin on fridayafternoon and asked my partner to check it out after work. Axolotls are exotic in Belgium, so the vet couldn't really help us. In the aquarium store, they recommended we'd first use omnipur (a broadspectrum treatment) and to add Baktopur when the spots were gone. We did that on saturday, but by nightfall we thought we'd lost Sita (she is the white one). In the morning she had moved from her resting spot, but she didn't move her gills, she didn't move, didn't eat. On sundaymorning it was apparent she had died. The fungus just spread so fast. It was eerie to see...

We put Lisa (the dark one) in quarantine now. We'll give her fresh water each day and give salt baths twice a day for the next week. Lisa still has white spots, but she seems healthy. She swims a lot, she is vivacious, and eats.
After the quarantine, she'll goback into the aquarium. Do we just give her fresh water and a clean tank? Or do we start over without oxygenplants and sand at the bottom of the tank?

Is our treatment for Lisa good? Could we have done something for Sita earlier on?
I guess I am looking for warning signs, for monitoring tips, ... Because we are kind of lost on what made her sick so quickly, or which signs we missed?

Thanks a bunch for your help!

 

[Murk]

Hi! So sorry for the loss of your axolotl.

Keeping axolotls can be pretty easy since they're simple creatures: but that also means that if something goes wrong it's hard to fix.

From just the story and the before-pictures it's hard to diagnose what happened to Sita. In general, fungus doesn't kill in two days (unless with larvae and young juveniles). That means that if she died because of the fungus she must've had it much, much longer. If not, she probably died due to other causes and vulnerability to fungus was just a symptom.
To put it bluntly: either you missed problems that were present for a long, long time, or there was nothing you could've done better.

When noticing problems with axolotls, it's always useful (maybe even necessary) to have water parameters at hand. If you can tell us at the least the ammonia, nitrites and nitrates levels, that would help a lot.
With fungus problems, I would normally expect too high ammonia levels.

As for Lisa, the treatment sounds good. Quarantine in fresh water should clear out the fungus in due time (with salt baths if it's not improving) - then back in a clean, fresh aquarium. I would keep the plants and the sand for sure, or you'd lose most of your cycle.
What kind of filter do you use?

That should be all for now. See if you can get us more information on your filter and water parameters, maybe something shows up!

 

[ReginaSimone]

Thank you so much. I feel responsible, so thank you for your candor! I don't ever want to experience that again, so I appreciate you help!

I didn't share the sick pictures because seeing them makes me makes me feel like sh*t, but you are absolutely right. Picture 1 is Sita one friday, when I noticed the spots. She was still happily swimming around then. Too bad I can't upload the video I made. I don't have a better picture of that day. I was still very sure we caught it early, so I wasn't as vigilant as I should have been. The second picture is Sita on saturday. She was very still that day, not happy. She fungus had spread from her head to her tail. We gave the antibiotics. The second picture is sundaymorning, when she died. You can just see the fungus spread over the days, her gills are gone and it is just everywhere (even on her beak).

My wife had said on wednesday that Sita had lost weight, so she wasn't eating right. We had switched over to different food after that, but that didn't do any good. So maybe she was weak because she wasn't eating? I have noticed that we had to clean the tank a lot more than the first months. The filter is een Eheimfilter large ball filter. It came with the tank. It sits inside the tank.We change it regularly and we made sure that it doesn't create too much flow in the water.

We don't monitor the water but for the temperature. How exactly do we monitor those parameters? Can we find materials in the aquarium store? Then we'll get right on that!

We're kind of afraid that maybe it's the oxygenplants or sand that created the fungus. But that's not true then?

Any tips for live food? They ate all the zebrafish, but I hear they love worms as well and they are easier to find in our neighborhood. Any worm can be put in the tank? I'm kind of afraid of parasites now.

 

[Murk]

Oof, I can understand being a bit traumatised by that.
I have raised a dozen healthy axolotls by now, but also one that just stopped eating and slowly withered away, no matter what I did. Never been able to find out what went wrong. It stays with you.
Don't feel too bad about it, though. A little guilt is good, but these things happen, sadly.

Anyway, she* already looked pretty bad in picture 1. By the time of picture 2 I wouldn't have expected her to make it.
I can't be sure what happened, of course. I still think this is either a case of wrong water management, which led to both the not-eating and the fungus - or she had some other illness, and the not-eating and the fungus just came because she was sick anyway.

However, if this was due to bad water management I would've expected the other axolotl to show more signs as well.

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Here too ammonia, nitrite and nitrate readings would help.
You can definitely get a small kit for that at the aquarium store. It's not expensive and doesn't take much time. I barely ever use the test, but especially when setting up a new tank it can be very useful.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the three, so I'll give a short summary:
Ammonia comes from rotting stuff and poop. In high doses it's toxic for animals, but fungi love it. Most fungus problems relate to high levels of ammonia.
To keep ammonia levels low, you need to either be very vigilant (and remove all uneaten food, dead plants and poop), or have a friendly colony of beneficial bacteria.

These beneficial bacteria eat ammonia, and turn it into Nitrites. The bacteria live on rough surfaces (such as sand and plants), and this is the main purpose of your filter: to house bacteria and pump ammonia-rich water past them, so that they can remove the ammonia and turn them into nitrites.
Nitrites, though, are toxic as well. High levels of nitrites give axolotls "burns" - red skin, withered gills, loss of appetite, etc.
To combat the nitrites, you need even more (different) bacteria: who eat the nitrites and turn them into nitrates.

Nitrates are slightly toxic as well, but only at much higher levels. So, if you have enough bacteria to turn ammonia into nitrites and nitrites into nitrates, you can just remove a bit of water every few weeks and keep the nitrates low that way (live plants use nitrates to grow as well. In a healthy and planted tank, you barely need to do any maintenance).

These bacteria appear on their own, but only if there is enough to eat for them.
That's why starting a new tank is relatively dangerous: the ammonia-eating bacteria will only appear once ammonia levels are too high. A week or so after that, nitrite-eating bacteria will only appear once nitrite levels are too high.
This process of attracting the bacteria is called "cycling" and once done (once you have enough bacteria to eat all the ammonia and nitrites), the tank is cycled.
Since you got the axolotls in November, there is a chance your tank isn't fully cycled yet, and this is why it's useful to measure the ammonia, nitrites and nitrates.
In a well-cycled tank, ammonia and nitrites levels are 0 (or close to it).

That's why I'd recommend keeping the plants and the sand. Though there is a small chance they hold some of the fungus, they certainly house a lot of beneficial bacteria. If you remove the sand and the plants, you'd lose a lot of those bacteria, which would be counter-productive.
Similarly, when you clean the filter, please also make sure you don't clean it too well, i.e. by using hot water or using cleaning agents - it would kill all the beneficial bacteria and make your filter basically useless for a while. Of course you want a clean filter, but a little bit of dirt is a good home for the bacteria

Anyway, that was a long detour into water quality. It might not be relevant to you at all. Maybe nothing's wrong with your water at all, but it's worth checking out.
Also, since you're from Belgium - do you need to dechlorinate your tap water or not? I'm not sure.

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Since this post is already ridiculously long, I might as well answer your question about live food too.
Most worms are fine, but don't just "put them in the tank" - make sure the axolotl actually eats them. If the worms burrow in the sand and drown, they will rot and give you a big ammonia spike (see above). The same goes for any not-live food: if it isn't eaten, try to remove it.
I love earthworms, because they're cheap, easily available and the axolotls do well on them, but I know others have their own favourite worms. I expect a varied diet to be best.
Fish are not often recommended, because they tend to carry very specific diseases. Axolotls love live shrimp, but live shrimp are expensive.
I wouldn't worry about parasites too much unless you get live food from natural water (the pond in your back yard, for example). Plants and animals from pet stores tend to hide stowaways, so most people recommend quarantining them for a few weeks before putting them in your aquarium. I personally love all the snails and dragonfly larvae (etc.) that I accidentally picked up, but I know it's not the smartest thing to do.


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*Are you sure they're female? If I had to guess, I'd guess male for both.

 

[ReginaSimone]

Oh yeah, they are male. My daughter really wanted females, so we just decided to give them girl's names and call it a day. Because of their names, I started referring to them as she.

Thanks so much for the info on the water parameters. It'll help us understand the parameters, but most importantly the consequences better.
We'll go and get a kit tomorrow! That we can prepare the tank better for after the quarantine.
We drink unfiltered tab water, so dechlorination is not neccessary, I guess. But the place where got the tank supplies (Heevis in Eindhoven) recommended us some products called Aquasafe and Reptosafe by tetra.

We also never use cleaningproducts to clean the tank. We use tab water and sponges. The sponges are never used for anything other than cleaning the tanks (our other daughter has goldfish and our son has turtles).

My kids just fished some earthworms out of the ground in the backyard for the axie. Best to put them back and go buy them then?

Gha, I feel so unprepared with all my questions. But the internet doesn't hold that much specific information. So thanks a bunch!

 

[Murk]

It can indeed be hard to find information about axolotls. This site is pretty good, but even here most of us are hobbyists who can only speak from personal experience.



Whether you need to process the tab water really depends on... well, the tab water. I'm lucky enough to get aquarium-ready water from the tab so I don't know that much about it. Hopefully you can get some good information on it from somewhere else (otherwise, following aquarium store advice is often best).



Earthworms from the backyard should be just fine. I guess, theoretically, they could hold parasites, but I doubt those same parasites would then not be present in store-bought worms. It's just that buying worms is easier

 

[ReginaSimone]

It is so convenient to send the kids to the yard after a long workday

Ifeel better equiped now. Thanks!! roud: