12/24/2024
The flooding of the market & several other factors is why I recently decided, despite 2 years of meticulous planning & collecting of healthy, breeding quality animals, to not pursue breeding axolotls like I had originally planned.
I do hope to raise a small amount of eggs from someone reputable in the future but not right now. I even gifted the last of my females to another breeder I trust & am only keeping a couple of male tanks at the moment.
You can expect a re-branding here sometime soon. ❤️
I am, as usual this time of year, starting to see a lot of posts about “oops” axolotl clutches, begging for help and guidance after the event. Just as disturbingly, I see breeders post pics of tubs full of hundreds, if not thousands, of eggs and/or hatchlings. Not cool, people.
I get complaints that my posts are too long. A lot. I do try to limit the length of my posts, and honestly more gets left on the cutting room floor than I post. I feel I need all those words to clarify points and provide context, or I will be flooded with reams of “yeah, but what about…”, and “that’s only true if…”, and “you’re stupid”, etc.
But I get it: Many of you have been raised on soundbites, memes, Twitter (I will never say “X”), and TicToc. Punctuation, exposition, and clarification are not your thing.
So here is a severe edit from an old post (from April 10,2024) with all the extraneous stuff cut away::
…producing and distributing a large number of animals… is a problem. … inbreeding in the pet trade has increased with each generation. …with so many animals from desirable lineages flooding the pet trade it is inevitable that closely related animals will sometimes get paired.
When pet shops get a hundred babies from… an “oops” clutch, or someone… hatches an “oops” clutch because they don’t have the good sense or courage to do the right thing and cull the eggs, the odds that those animals are not the offspring of siblings or first cousins is pretty low.
(How) to reduce the problem?
(a) Produce smaller clutches, and
(b) Breed each animal only once or twice.
If you produce 500 babies from one clutch… there is a very high probability that some of those siblings are going to end up paired together to produce more in**ed offspring.
If… you produce only 50 offspring… the probability that any of those axolotls will be paired with their siblings or other close relatives is only one tenth as great!
If you hatch 40 and sell 460 (eggs), you're still producing 500 babies from the same pairing!
"But wait," you say, …”If I hatch only 50 eggs I may lose them all!" …you have no idea what you are doing and should stop doing it. …your survival rate with a clutch of 30 to 40 babies should be 95% or better.
Limiting any axolotl to just one or two clutches is a simple way to maintain some genetic diversity.
(Producing smaller clutches means) the breeder is raising... fewer, healthier offspring, and can therefore command higher prices. Producing fewer offspring per clutch and per adult axolotl benefits the axolotls, the breeders, and the pet owners. Everyone wins!
