As mentioned in my first post of the year, I embarked on a lovely adventure of raising axolotl eggs. And by lovely I mean that everything went wrong. Due to the shipping schedules being messed up by snow and holidays, I didn't get the food for the hatchlings until they had been in the fridge for a week; naturally, the extended cold killed all of the ones that had hatched. I was able to find a few unhatched ones that survived (I think the end count was 10), so I put those in a Tupperware container and fed them baby brine shrimp that I had to raise myself.
I think natural selection was reversed in my case because the healthy ones would've been the ones to hatch early, so the fridge actually killed the good ones. Some of the survivors were a little defective swimming, but they were also small. They were about ½ inch or so, so it was hard to determine exact color genetics, but I think there was one white one (albino or leucistic), one golden albino (these ones have light eyes so it looks like they don't have any), and some that were either wild or melanoid.
And as the use of past tense may suggest, our house got too cold the last Monday I was home and all of the hatchlings died. It wasn't great, but I wouldn't have had the time and space to raise them all anyway.
But never fear; I had the kids together in their transport container for about a half-hour before I decided to separate them for the trip back, and apparently that was enough because there was another batch of eggs in my tank this past Sunday. Those are currently in another Tupperware container on my dresser, so we'll see how that batch comes out.
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