First Axolotl Breeding Attempt In 5 Years!

[blinky000]

I've had a lot of interest from people asking when I'm going to breed my axolotls again and until recently, I had no plans to ever do it again but I've never been any good with peer pressure!
I have a massive interest in genetics so I've worked out the genotypes of almost all of my axolotls to see which ones I could get the more popular colours from. My golden albino, Advocaat, is obviously the best choice in terms of getting a larger proportion of leucistics and albinos so the next step was to figure out who to put her with. Despite the fact that I have 8 axolotls, the majority are related (some of them more than once ) and the results of inbreeding in axolotls is far from the result of inbreeding in bettas, so whoever she was put with would have to be completely unrelated. This left me with 2 options: Lou, who she has successfully bred with before, and Bailey, who has never had a brood and whose genotype is a complete mystery to me.
While Lou is quite the eligible bachelor, and looking very good for his age, I knew that his genotype meant that I would only get 1/4 leucistics and 3/4 wildtype, which isn't ideal from a business point of view. So then we were left with Bailey. Since I've never had a brood from him before, his genotype is unknown. I can narrow it down to a few based on his colouration but who knows what we could get. We might be able to produce some albinos and lots of leucistics or we run the risk of producing 100% wildtypes, but unless we try, we'll never know!
Since Bailey and Advocaat have been alone in the boys' tank since last night, Timmy and Lou have made their way upstairs to lodge with the girls, so we'll no doubt have a clutch from up there since Lou has a reputation for being fairly prolific! So watch this space for updates on the Bailey x Advocaat breeding attempts and the mystery batch!
Here are the prospective parents! Wish us luck!

***While writing this post, some spermatophores were found in the upstairs tank. I blame Lou ***

 

[Man of fish]

Awww they're sooo cute. Good luck

 

[blinky000]

Thank you Lola has been laying her eggs for the past 15 hours now. Poor girl looks exhausted. We're easily up to 300 eggs and she's still going

 

[Man of fish]

Ooh that's good. How hard are they to breed?

 

[blinky000]

Fairly easy really. A sudden increase in temperate tends to trigger the male into laying sperm cones which he'll guide the female over, and the eggs are fertilised internally. A day or two later, she lays the eggs one by one and 2 weeks after that the fun begins haha. They do tend to be a little harder to breed when you actually want them to, though! I got a lovely video of her laying an egg but my pet rats chewed my card reader. I swear one of them suffers from pica!

 

[blinky000]

She'd laid so many eggs this morning that she ran out of places to deposit them and had started putting them on her tankmates, so I cleared off one of the plants for her. This is what it looked like by 8am:

I took off 84 eggs from that plant alone. And of course, 4 hours later, it looked exactly like it did before.

Here's a video of the happy couple! If you skip to about 0:40 you can see Lola depositing two eggs on the bogwood by doing a little shimmy



In the end, she spent a massive 18 hours doing this without a break. Poor girl. At least the hard part is over for her. Now it's my turn!

 

[Jenste]

Yay!!!!
Can't wait for more photos!

 

[dipsydoodlenoodle]

How are the eggs doing?

 

[blinky000]

They're good, thank you They're chilling in a 14 gal now. There's not a lot of change in the eggs just yet because the eggs are kept quite cold but I saw the cells dividing when I was taking them out of the tank so I know they're fertile. SO interesting to see. http/www.ambystoma.de/html/axolotl/axolotl_development.html

 

[blinky000]

A quick update for you. The eggs are cooking nicely. They're going through what I affectionately call the taco stage:

I took about 30 unfertilised ones out just now. There are a few sets of twins/triplets/quads with some fertilised and unfertilised ones inside the same egg but I'll just hang onto those and see what happens. I've decided to move Bailey into the girl tank upstairs on a semi-permanent basis. It's considerably warmer up there which should trigger breeding behaviour on his part. Fingers crossed

 

[Man of fish]

Ooo good luck.

 

[blinky000]

They're really starting to look like little embryos now. You can just about see the gill buds developing

 

[blinky000]

We had our first little hatchlings last night! So far we have one leucistic and one wildtype Here's a couple of shots of the leucistic:

Perfect little miniatures

 

[Jenste]

aw! Lovely!!!!

 

[blinky000]

Well. An interesting twist occurred last night! Since the downstairs ones are at a lower temperature, they have been developing quite a lot slower than the ones upstairs from the same batch. I was sorting through the eggs to make sure that before the babies started hatching, there were no fungusy ones to contaminate them. While sorting them, I noticed that a few seemed rather underdeveloped and I couldn't even see the black spots where their eyes should be. Upon closer inspection, I realised they weren't developing slowly at all, they were albinos! Which means that Lou ISN'T the dad at all, and little Timmy is! I didn't think he had it in him
Here's a comparison of a wildtype and leucistic twin:

And a little albino:

That one looks as though it may be a golden but knowing that Lola is dd/Aa and Timmy is Dd/Aa, we'll have a few white albinos in the mix too! Exciting!