Hi Koryos! How do you feed your yid-lotls? (heh) I used to have axolotls before and feeding them was SUCH a pain, they were so clumsy it was near impossible to get food in their faceholes. I couldn't just leave food on the bottom of the tank on a plate (not that it would've stayed on a plate anyway, floating around), because they'd never manage to get it in their mouths. Only time I successfully got them to eat was feeding them earthworms with tweezers, but the water was so cold, and they (1/2)
(2/2) took forever to eat, that I couldnāt hold my arm under the water for very long. Then Iād have to take 15 minutes to recover feeling in my arm before trying again. It took HOURS to feed them! It was such a pain. This was the reasons I moved my axolotls to a smaller tank, but it was worse for the axolotls. I would love to have them as pets again, but I just donāt see how I would manage any better. How do you get food in their mouths??
Hello friend! Yes, feeding axolotls can sometimes be quite a challenge, especially when youāre stuck holding food in front of an unresponsive axolotlās face for five minutes in freezing water. Having owned my oldest lotls for six years now, Iāve tried innumerable feeding methods, which Iāll list in a moment. But before that I want to talk a bit about why it can be so frustrating to feed them.
Axolotls rely on four senses, primarily, to find food: sight, scent, hearing, and touch. The way that all of these senses function is not exactly analogous to our own. For example, axolotls have very poor vision, and because of the positioning of their eyes, actually cannot see anything directly in front of and beneath their snout. This is why they so often do that frustrating thing where they stand directly in front of a piece of food and donāt seem to notice it.
I drew a rough approximation of Moonyās field of vision here- itās probably a little too narrow, but you get the idea:
Basically, thereās a huge blind spot directly in front of them, so if you want to feed them, itās actually better to hold the food near the side of their head.
Another thing to keep in mind in terms of axolotl vision is that they have high sensitivity but low acuity. This means that they are very good at seeing movement but not so good at resolving objects that are standing still. (Just like the T. rex in the original Jurassic Park, though tyrannosaurs didnāt actually have vision like that.) So even if a piece of food is within an axolotlās field of vision, if it isnāt moving, they probably actually canāt distinguish it from the background.
Now, axolotls at one point lived in the wild in water with low visibility, so it makes sense that they wouldnāt rely on vision as a primary hunting sense. To locate prey, they actually use scent and hearing- or rather, the aquatic equivalent, the lateral line system, which detects changes in water movement from a distance. Both of these senses work excellently in large underwater environmentsā¦ but not so great in a small aquarium. Thereās a lot of background noise to filter out, for example: water is constantly being cycled through the aquarium, which affects hearing as well as sense of smell, since the same smells are being re-circulated each time the water cycles. Also, if youāre dropping in a lot of food at once, thatās a lot of different signals for them to process all at the same time. If your hand goes in with the food, the axolotl may be picking up a good food smell but also a big movement sound: is it prey, or a big predator coming towards them?
All of this together can help us understand why axolotls may hesitate to eat when kept in aquaria. Of course, Iāve also noticed big differences between individual axolotls when it comes to sensitivity to these things around feeding time: some snap at absolutely everything, others clam up. I believe poor water quality and stress makes an axolotl much more likely to act reluctant around feeding time.
Now, on to the actual methods I use:
- Drop and wait method: This is what I do currently in my 55-gal tank. I feed a mix of live earthworms and pelleted food, alternating on different days. Generally I drop it in, wait half an hour, then pick up the remains with a gravel vacuum. The axolotls are capable of finding food using their sense of smell (they even lower their noses to sniff like dogs), but it can take them a few minutes to hone in on it. With earthworms I usually keep an eye on them in case they wriggle somewhere the axolotls canāt reach them, but generally my guys get pretty excited about the worms and pick them up right away.
- Above the nose method: Iāve found that the best way to trigger a snap reflex is to drop food directly above or slightly adjacent to an axolotlās nose. The slow falling motion isnāt as intimidating as a hand reaching down, and they often have quite good aim when picking up the food. Of course, sometimes they miss.Ā
This method works best if you take the axolotls out when feeding them and put them in a smaller container- which also helps maintain the water quality of the tank because the food isnāt getting in there; also, if youāre like me, you can get a little tank cleaning done while the babs eat. However, it can be stressful for the lotls to be moved around, depending on how you move them and for how long. Some sensitive ones may not eat after being moved.
- Jar method: You mentioned the issue with food just sliding off a plate in an aquatic environment (also being shoved by a clueless axolotl). Axolotls also have trouble with food placed in bowls because when their nose bumps into the side of one they have a hard time grasping that they should go up and over the edge to reach the food inside. Usually, they try to wedge themselves underneath the bowl in the direction the food smellās coming from. Look, there arenāt any bowls in nature, ok? Anyway, my solution to this, if you want to keep your food contained, is to put it inside a glass jar filled with water, then lay the jar on its side at the bottom of the aquarium. The axolotls can usually figure out how to get into the jar if the lip is flush with the aquarium bottom, and the food will stay relatively contained. This method can be difficult in tanks with multiple axolotls, though, as all of them will try to get in the jar at once and somebody usually ends up getting nipped.
- Extra-long tongs method: Iāve never tried this myself, but I know of people who simply use really long reptile feeding tongs (or even regular cooking tongs) to hold earthworms for their axolotls to avoid the whole freezing-arm thing.
Anyway! This was an extremely long answer to a question you probably wanted a single sentence for, but I hope it helps!
