My one advise for anyone looking to start breeding as a business. Snails. This is our biggest money maker, these are by far our best selling product, selling 20+ a week. While you're not going to become a millionaire selling snails, they're essentially whats paying for the day to day.
Check our instagram for progress pics for the fish room over the last week as well as the first few tanks setup (without the water change system) as well as keeping up to date on how our setup is coming along.
We're also going to put up a Wormery guide this week as well as we've had a few people ask how to set one up for their Axolotls
]]>We messed up, or rather, I messed up, completely forgot to post the update for last week! So what have we done in the last 2 weeks? Honestly not that much, we're sorry! We're overrun with Axolotls! They're amazing creatures and we've managed to sell about 50 in the last couple of weeks but there's still over 200 more! If you know anyone that's interested then point them our way ;)
Aside from that, sales on eBay are going strong, we're seeing a big increase on our weekly sales volume, this can vary massively as one day we'll have maybe one order then the next we'll have 9. Me and Georgie we're both massively ill over the last couple of days and that is of course the time when we have record sales!
A bit of advice for anyone out there looking at getting into setting up their own fish business (or business in general!) Start small with a few products, then as their sales increase, expand to more, we only have 12 products (we started with 3, 8 weeks ago!) at the moment but that's great for us, we're bringing in enough sales to pay for this website and pay for the food of all of our animals, we're even starting to make enough money to pay for our food shop! Now this is only possible because I'm also working full time, and honestly I don't even want to begin to try to figure out how this would be possible without working full time. So for those of you looking for a guide on how to do this full time, this unfortunately isn't the blog for you!
Saying this though, if you want to get some cash on the side then something like this is great, the maintenance costs are what you put into it. If we didn't have the website then the only maintenance costs would be to pay the 30p listing fees for each eBay item each month, which as long as you're making atleast 1 sale in each month, you should get back! Everything else comes out as and when you make a sale, sure we wish people would buy from us direct, as we're making more money for the same price for the customer, but we also understand eBay are a known brand and people are more comfortable in having that relationship with eBay than they are with us if something goes wrong. Its just something we're working on.
So yeah, its what you make of it, if you have 100 products on eBay but don't manage to sell on half of them, that's cutting into your profit, and if you're only making 10-20p on each of those items but then its taking you 10 minutes to wrap and post off each of those items, you're getting paid £1.20 an hour, is it worth it? The real trick is to find a product where you can make a decent amount of profit on, isn't too hard to prepare, and is in a fairly unique position. So, easy right! You won't know until you've tried it, we've had plenty of ideas we thought were killer, only to put them out onto eBay to get absolutely no interest, we've even had 2 products where we made no sales at all so now we're just selling them at break even costs to get rid (and even then we're struggling to get rid!)
Thats all for this week! We'll try a little harder for next week, the website is going through a bit of a revival this week so we're hoping it'll be a bit easier to see all of our products and how best we can serve you!
]]>So what else have we done this week? Well, we finally listed the Ramshorn Snails who have been breeding like crazy, those are available to buy here! We also managed to find a new supplier for Airline hose which has halved our costs which mean we've reduced to price of this and all bundles across both our Website and eBay.
Next week we hope to start listing our Cherry Shrimp as well as potentially our Guppies as we've setup our APC courier licence so we can start shipping across the country with the only legal fish courier! This gives us fantastic reach across the country.
Another exciting thing is our Axolotl babies are finally big enough to start moving to their new homes so we've started contacting local pet shops and people that were previously interested to see if we can start bringing out 270 number down!
]]>So the plan for this update was to unveil the big surprise that is our fish room, we were hoping it had finally been setup, unfortunately due to unexpected things happening, the initial setup will probably get finished off by next week (we're 99% of the way there already!)
So what was unexpected? So fish racks are bloody expensive! However, facebook marketplace is half decent! We managed to pick up a garage shelving unit for £20 which can hold 265 kilos per shelf! (we're only using half that weight and splitting the unit in half to put the tanks on top, picture at the bottom!) but these things new are only £40 on amazon.
So we picked up this shelving unit, great! This is amazing, it says it can be split in half so that it essentially becomes 2 90cm x 60cm units about a metre high, so we bring it back, set it all up and we notice 2 initial problems. First, these measurements are a lie, its about 88cm x 58cm which would be fine, except we're planning on putting 3 tanks side by side on each top which are 60x30 which means its not quite big enough. The second problem is the legs of the stand actually go higher than the board on top of the stand which meant that if we put tanks on the stand, the ones on the corners would essentially be lifted up by the metal legs which isn't a great idea if we don't want our tanks to crack as soon as we put water in them.
So, we though, its okay, we're just buy some plywood, this comes in 183x61 so we'll just cut this in half and place this on top and drill in some screws to keep them together. Great, but then now there is a slight bowing effect where the legs are lifting up the corners so that the middle of the board sags when the tanks are on top. This is where we're at now, we now have 2 choices, we can either shave off a couple of mm from each of the corners so that the legs fit but then 2 of the corners will be overhanging slightly or we can carve into the plywood so that the legs just slot into place. This is by far the better option, its just having the skill to be able to pull it off!
We hope to have this completed by the next weekly update, but for now, enjoy these couple of progress pics and we'll hopefully have this done by our next update.
Our shrimpy boys are also doing well, I've attached another sneaky pic down the bottom, we're hoping to start selling these along with the axolotls and guppies in the next couple of weeks!
]]>So once again, I'll start with our customary it was a quiet one this week. But really it has! Next week we will be doing a bit more!
We currently have 6 tanks at Fully Cycled HQ (2 bedroom flat!), I'll attach some pictures at the bottom of this article but, these are:
You might think that's a lot of tanks for a 2 bedroom flat! Well to that I say yes, it is quite a few! But the maintenance for these tanks is not actually that much, we can do all of our tanks in about an hour, this includes a 50% water change and a gravel clean which we normally do at some point over the weekend. Obviously this can change, as we recently had a bit of an algae bloom in the 120L Community tank so we cleaned up some of the ornaments in the tank as well as did a 70% water change while adjusting the light cycle and adding some algae remover which so far has helped keep the algae at bay!
How do we do water changes so quickly do you ask? Well its actually really easy, we bought a pump which is meant to be used for water features in the garden, and hooked it up to a hose, so all we need to do is stick the pump in the tank and put the other end of the hose in the sink and turn it on, the pump itself has small enough holes that we don't have to worry about anything getting sucked up (except the shrimp tank which we do with a siphon!) this can drain half the water in our 240L tank in about 5 minutes which really makes our life easy. We also then pump in tap water which we treat with declorinator as we're filling up the tanks. If theres 2 things that make all of this 10x easier its the pump and a long hose! Even if you have just the one tank, if it takes more than 1 bucket to do a water change, I highly recommend buying one!
As promised, see our tanks below!
Mushu & Mulans 240L
Our 60L Dwarf Puffer tank
Our 30L Cherry Shrimp Tank
Our 120L Community Tank
Our 30L Holding/Snail Breeding tank
Our 90L Community Tank
]]>We've also setup a Wave account that'll help us keep track of all of our finances so we know exactly what we've spent, on which items, how much money we've received, how much money we're spending on shipping, on fees, on subscriptions, all kinds of things. First impressions of this software are good, as we realised we were not taking the PayPal fees into account when we setup our eBay prices which Wave highlighted how much we were spending on PayPal fees! Because of this we've adjusted a few of our prices on the items we sell.
We calculate our prices based on a couple of things, I'll attach an image below so you can see what we use to calculate everything. For eBay, because of the insane amount of fees we pay to eBay and PayPal, we have to charge more, we also have to pay for Premium eBay ads, as during our tests, although the item prices were higher for items we advertised, their sales also increased (tested over a process of 1 week with ads and 1 week without), we will go back and test this theory as we have more products, but for now we feel we need the eBay ads to help stand out.
I appreciate the above image may be a bit small on most screens but you can right click the image and "open in a new tab" to view it a bit closer.
So what is this, from left to right.
So I admit this is a lot to take in all at once but its not as bad as it looks! All of this is calculated with some sweet maths, so all we have to enter is our costs to buy the item, how much it costs to ship the item, and make sure the eBay %s are correct (these vary depending on what category we list the item)
We also have a sheet linked to this (below) which contains all the fees and costs of posting, for example, PayPal take a fee of 3.4% + 20p of whatever we sell the item for so we need to make sure this is all calculated when we're working out the sale prices.
We try to stay as competitive as possible compared to our rivals. For example, one of our competitors is listing a competing DIY Brine shrimp hatchery for £18 on eBay, which looking at their product is the equivalent of the same item we're selling for £9.89. Could we up our prices to be closer to theirs? Probably but we've got a specific formula for calculating our prices, any more than that is just greedy, and we feel exploits our customers. We want to be able to grow our business, and to do that, we need to keep our prices as competitive as possible, but we also need to be smart. What we look for, in all of our items on eBay are 2 things, can we sell cheaper and will be of as good or higher quality, below are 2 items we looked at.
We wanted to look at selling Indian Almond Leaves (Catappa Leaves) but realised to be able to compete with the other sellers on eBay, we'd be making a loss. The current cheapest is 10 leaves for £2.99, (ignoring chinese sellers), we talked to a supplier in india who was willing to sell us 1000 leaves shipped to us for £112, so this worked out at a cost of £1.12 per item, great, lets sell! Well, not quite yet, we also have to add postage cost, which for this would be 0.83 + 0.04 for the ink/paper/bag costs, so now we're on £1.99, then if we sell at £2.89 to undercut our competitors, and take into account all the fees, our total cost is £2.85... Great, we make 4p! Ok, what if we take off the premium ads, we won't get as many sales but maybe the increased profit will be worth it. That brings our total cost for this to £2.68, we make 21p. In the end, for this much upfront cost we didn't think it was worthwhile, sure, we could cut our costs a bit by buying 10000 leaves instead but we currently don't have the sales to justify that kind of big upfront purchase.
However, we did notice that selling Live Baby Brine Shrimp from our DIY Hatcheries could be a viable product to sell as we'd be able to sell cheaper than our competitors, and have a product that's as good if not better than our competitors. While we would still be making less than £1 per sale in profit, the sheer amount of live food sales on eBay will make up for this lack of profit from individual sales.
Aside from our sweet maths, our dwarf puffer guide has also been posted, the day after we posted this we saw our first baby puffies in the tank, we had been thinking they had been acting odd for the last few days so this is good sign for us as we've only had them a couple of months and they're already breeding for us! We will hopefully be posting a guide for cultivating your own vinegar eels, as this is great first puffy food before they get big enough to take things like baby brine shrimp.
]]>Originally from the waters in southern India, these tiny puffers have taken the aquarium hobby by storm, widely available around the UK, they should be readily available to purchase, expect to pay £3+ in your LFS. Its important to note that you should make sure that the puffers you get are not wild caught, this is due to the impact their popularity is having on their wild populations as while agriculture and deforestation plays its part, some studies are showing that their wild populations have dropped almost 40% in 5 years!
Housing for your Dwarf puffers is fairly simple, we do highly recommend you keep them as a species only tank, while people in the hobby have had success in community tanks, their psychotic side can come out at any moment and decimate your other fish. Amount wise, we recommend 20 litres (5 US gallons) for one puffer, then an extra 8 litres (2 US gallons) for every puffer after that, for our 54 litre breeding tank, we've currently got 6 puffers in there, 2 fully grown adults, and 4 juveniles. You also want to make sure the male to female ratio is at least 1 male to 2 females (3 is preferable!) to keep fighting to a minimum
Parameters wise, they are pretty hardy, and as long as you avoid the extremes they should be fairly comfortable, temperature wise 25-26 Celsius (77-79 Fahrenheit) with a pH of around 6.5-8.0 is where we've had success.
We recommend you have a strong filter though as these are very messy eaters (we'll come to that in a sec) so you'll need a strong filter to get through all the mess, but make sure there is not a lot of flow as these guys definitely prefer calmer waters.
Try to also make sure there are lots of places for them to explore, and also break up their eye-line. These creatures are highly intelligent and will follow you around if you stare in, they also like to explore so any caves you can give them to help keep them entertained will also keep fighting to a minimum. Having lots of plants also lets them escape other puffers that have turned psycho as typically these puffers are only angry at something as long as they can see it, as soon as its gone, they're calm again!
This is the hardest part about keeping dwarf puffers, they are very messy and picky eaters. Try to vary their diet as much as possible, while blood worms is a favourite (live or frozen). Brine shrimp, Daphnia or Cyclops should be included, but these may have to be live rather than frozen depending on your puffer! Flake food should be avoided as they'll just glare at you with one eye while staring at the flake letting it fester with the other. A key part though is to include snails, Malaysian Trumpet snails (MTS) or small Ramshorn snails are good as these will help to keep their teeth trimmed as while these guys are not as prone to having issues as their bigger cousins, its still a risk you should be aware of.
Dwarf puffers are an amazing species to keep in the aquarium hobby, they are highly intelligent fish that will stare you down trying to coax some more food out of you.
While them being a species only tank can put some people off, we highly recommend you take the plunge, we started our first puffer tank in a 30litre cube with 2, where we also had a cherry shrimp colony, while I'm sure the shrimp didn't appreciate it too much, we were fascinated with how the puffers would interact with not only the shrimp in the tank but also with things happening outside the tank
]]>The eBay front has been going very well, we've had quite an uptake in sales for our DIY Brine Shrimp Hatchery as well as our Axolotl Brooch, although another unexpected complication is eBay hold onto the money for 21 days while you're a new seller, thankfully it comes through if the buyer leaves a positive review or confirms delivery which we've been getting thankfully!
For this coming week its Georgies Birthday so we're heading off to Southend Aquarium which I'm sure there will be a few pictures of in next weeks update. On the business front we're looking to expand on our Brooches as these have been selling surprisingly well on eBay, we're also going to start looking at selling some live brine shrimp food using our home made hatcheries as while the profit margins on these are quite small, if we can get the quantities it could be a nice revenue stream. Plus our fish will love more fresh food!
We hope to put up another couple of care guides at some point this week as well as potentially a run through of the tanks we have and what we're trying to achieve with them.
]]>Note to self, check how big items can be for large letter postage! Our brine shrimp hatchery has caused us a bit of aggro as the CO2 bottle cap is a lovely 3cm in size and yet Royal Mail only allow up to 2.5cm to use a large letter, the problem here is the next stage up is a small parcel jumps from 83p to £2.90 so this CO2 cap we were selling for £2 suddenly has to cost atleast £4! Now you might say you should have checked that before putting up the item, and why would you show how incompetent you are in this blog post. You would be right we should have checked beforehand, and we did, as you see the CO2 bottle cap standing up is 2.5ishcm, we just didn't really consider that if at the time the person processing it, its on its side, then this would mean that it would be over the 2.5cm limit causing the buyer to then have to pay the difference in postage plus a £1 penalty charge. You might also say why don't you just hand it in yourself at the post office, make sure the CO2 cap is in the right position and post it through the slot. Yes, we tried that, however, that 2.5ish. It appears the CO2 cap when we put the bag around it and post it through the slot, the guy at the desk said we pushed it too much and we'd have to pay extra, as the "letter should be able to freefall through the slot" you may be able to get away with it, but in this instance we couldn't and in all honesty, don't want to risk any item getting to the buyer where they have to pay the extra postage, and a penalty charge.
The reason we're sharing this is that these blog posts are supposed to be everything we've learned along the way. Georgie and Myself started this business due to both a necessity and a curiosity. Mushu and Mulan had 400 Axolotl eggs which once they reached around 3 months old they'd be good to sell, however, Pet Shops only really buy from businesses unless you want store credit, which while we did consider, thought we'd take a chance and try to see if we could make something more.
We started out with no knowledge on how to run a business and while sure, there are plenty of guides for how to start up your business, none of them seemed to really fit with how we saw our business going, all of the home run businesses seemed to be for selling clothes from China, or doing Body Shop.
So think of these blog posts as a (hopefully one day) guide to running a successful aquatic store from the comfort of your own home.
]]>This post will cover how to go about cycling your tank but in a future post we'll also go over the common problems which can happen during the cycling process.
Now if you go into most local fish stores, they'll normally sell you some Seachem Stability and Seachem Prime. Now, this stuff is awesome, you put the right amount of Stability in daily and then put the Prime in every other day for a week and boom, you're done. Except, not quite. This is the start, at that point it is safe to add fish, but you can quite easily get spikes of harmful chemicals if you add too many fish or overfeed your tank. Especially during the first 6 or so weeks while your tank is getting established (cycling). So this post is going to go into the details of what we mean when you "cycle" a tank and so that if any problems happen, you will be able to figure out the solution and hopefully fix it, rather than just relying on different expensive Seachem products to sort it out! (we're using Seachem as an example but there are plenty of other companies that offer a similar thing!)
This is what we're talking about when we're asking if our tank is Fully Cycled, the nitrogen cycle is the process of turning Ammonia (Toxic) into Nitrite (Also Toxic), which in turn goes into Nitrates (Less Toxic).
But where is this Ammonia coming from? Well, that will mainly be from your fish, all that peeing and pooping that they do, that's one place, any food that's not eaten, that's another, but its not just the fault of your fish, your aquarium plants starting to die, that's another source. So as you can tell, there are a lot of reasons for a build up of Ammonia, and if you're not careful, Ammonia can quite easily kill your fish.
So how does that get turned into Nitrites? Well, Ammonia is turned into Nitrites by bacteria called Nitrosomonas if you have an Ammonia source in your tank then these little bacteria will thrive, they'll start to break down the Ammonia, essentially eating it and turning it into Nitrites.
Yay? No, Nitrites are still toxic unfortunately, but that's where our next bacteria come in handy. Nitrobacter breaks down the Nitrites into Nitrates, and that is the nitrogen cycle.
That bottle of Stability that the fish store sold you? It contains helpful bacteria like the Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter which help quickly establish your tank.
So I can relax now? Yes and no. Nitrates are still toxic to your fish, just no where near as toxic as Ammonia and Nitrites. While Ammonia and Nitrites you want to keep at 0 ppm (parts per million) Nitrates can go up to about 20-40. To test this we highly recommend you pick up an aquarium test kit, while you can use test strips, they tend to be a lot more expensive in the long run and tend to be a lot less accurate.
There are 2 methods to lower the Nitrates in your aquarium, you can do a partial water change, 20-50% every 1-4 weeks (as and when your Nitrates hit dangerous levels) or you can add aquarium plants, plants will eat up these Nitrates as fertiliser, that isn't to say that you'll never have to do any water changes, as chances are, your fish are going to be producing more waste than your plants can soak up, but they can help extend the time needed between water changes.
Now that the science is out of the way, we can talk you through how to go about cycling your tank. There are 2 main methods, a fish-in cycle and a fish-less cycle.
Let me start by saying this is not what we recommend, as it puts undue stress onto the fish which can cause illness and even kill your fish and should only be used if you cannot do the fish-less cycle.
The hardier the fish the better, a good example of a hardy fish is a guppy. These produce a ton of waste and can survive in harsher waters than most aquarium fish. We recommend 1-2 fish per 40 litres or so (10 gallons) as adding too many can lead to a spike in Ammonia levels and kill your fish before you even have a chance to react.
Once the fish are added, only feed them a moderate amount every other day, the reason for this is that the more they eat (or don't eat!), the more waste they produce which again, can lead to an Ammonia spike.
You'll need to do more regular water changes as well, we recommend doing a 10-15% water change every other day, this ensures you're not removing too much Ammonia that the growing bacteria is trying to feast on but also keeping it low enough so as not to kill your fish. Make sure when you add the new water you're pre-treating it with dechlorinator (or using dechlorinated water in the first place!) as adding chlorinated water will kill off all the helpful bacteria and ruining the cycling process.
We also recommend you're testing your water every 2-3 days for Ammonia, Nitrite and Nitrates, you'll see the Ammonia and Nitrite levels start to rise after the first couple days, as long as you're following along correctly, once both the Ammonia and Nitrite levels reach 0ppm, your tank is finally, Fully Cycled.
So now what? Can I add more fish? Yes, but slowly, the bacteria has build up enough to support the 1-2 fish you added, add another 1-2 fish then test the water again after a week, if the Ammonia and Nitrites are still 0ppm, you can add more fish. Keep up this process until you have your desired amount of fish but ensure you do not overstock your tank!
This is the preferred method for anyone in the aquarium hobby, there are no fish in the tank to put any undue stress on and the most humane way to do it.
But without any fish how do we get the Ammonia we need to build up the bacteria? Simple. Add about as much fish food as you would normally feed your fish into the tank every 12 hours or so, if you're unsure, add a small pinch of food.
Test the water for Ammonia every couple of days until you see the levels sitting at 3ppm, at which point you can stop adding the food. Keep testing every couple of days and if the levels drop below 3ppm, add some more food in. Do this for atleast a week.
After that first week, you should start testing for Nitrites, once you start seeing Nitrite levels in your tank, you know the cycling process has started, keep adding the flakes and testing for Ammonia.
After a couple of weeks, you should notice the Nitrite levels start to fall, its at this point you can start testing for Nitrates, when you notice this, its a signal the cycle is almost complete.
Keep testing until the Ammonia and Nitrites are sitting at 0ppm, congratulations, your tank is Fully Cycled, make sure your Nitrates are below 40, if not, you'll have to do a partial water change to bring those Nitrates back to acceptable levels. Note that this entire process can take 4-8 weeks!
So now I can add fish? Yes! But the same as the fish-in cycle, add slowly, and keep testing each week to make sure you haven't overloaded your tank. It can also be a good idea if you have any substrate to give it a good siphon to ensure that there is no trapped decaying food waste which could cause an Ammonia spike if released.
Yes, there are things you can do to HELP speed it along, there is no magic potion that'll instantly cycle your tank, if there was, we wouldn't need to write these big articles on how to do it! Here are our 4 methods.
This one is pretty simple, but not really possible if you're setting up your first tank. Most of the helpful bacteria will live on your aquarium filter media, so this one is easy, if you've already got a tank setup which has media in its filter, take some of it out and use it in your new aquarium.
As above, this one isn't really possible if you're setting up your first tank. This method involves putting your new aquarium filter into an already established aquarium, simply let it run alongside the existing filter for a week or so and some of the helpful bacteria in that tank will nest itself onto the new filter.
Live plants will help introduce bacteria to help the whole process along, especially if you're sourcing them from an already established tank. These will also help bring you're Ammonia levels down quicker if you're using a faster growing plant.
4. The Chemical Method
Now this isn't something we suggest to keep up long term, its expensive and will break the bank! We mentioned this at the start of the post about fish stores selling you Seachem Prime and Stability. The Stability contains bacteria which will help kickstart your tank and should make the cycling process happen quicker, the Prime is essentially an emergency solution, it binds to the Ammonia and Nitrite in your tank essentially making it less toxic for 48 hours so that the bacteria can continue its Nitrogen cycle. So with this method, you do an initial dose like we explained at the beginning of this post, then every 48 hours add more prime. You will still have to do water changes when the nitrate levels get too high but it can be a helpful stopgap to keep your fish alive if something goes wrong. Note however this isn't always the case, as Seachem themselves say they don't know how it works, it just does!
Now, we know these above methods might not be for everyone but that's the only options we have really, there is also a downside to using the above methods as well. Any sort of nastiness that could be lurking in those established tanks could quite easily make its way into yours. This could be anything ie parasites or harmful bacteria, if you don't know for certain that the tank they have come from is safe, don't risk it!
]]>Axolotls are a type of salamander, but unlike other salamanders, they do not undergo physical changes, from a larvae (juvenile) to full grown Axolotl. They stay at the juvenile stage for their entire life. Axolotls are fully aquatic and can not live outside of the water.
Axolotls can range in colour or morph such as golden, albino, leucistic (white with black eyes and pink gills) , black and many more.
(Mulan & Mushu are Leucistic.)
These animals are not too difficult to care for but do have some specific needs. As they are fully aquatic they require a fish tank, it is recommended that one Axolotl has a 20 gallon (80 litres) aquarium, with plenty of floor space as they like to walk around on the substrate. GRAVEL MUST NOT BE USED AS A SUBSTRATE! Axolotls can and will eat the gravel and it will cause compaction the their bowels, this can cause illness. If you want some pebbles or rocks in your aquarium, that's fine, just make sure that the rocks are bigger than the Axolotls head.
Tap water is OK for an Axolotl aquarium, as long as it is pre-treated with a water conditioner to remove the chlorine. The water should be tested at least once a week to ensure nitrates, nitrites and ammonia levels are kept as low as possible.
As Axolotls do not have eyelids they prefer less light and they also prefer to be kept at a cooler temperature, between 16-22 (16-18 is preferable!) degrees Celsius (60 - 71 Fahrenheit). Which in the summer can be very difficult, so we chose to bottle some tank water and freeze it to put into the tank to cool it down. An aquarium chiller is also a very good option but these can get very expensive. So a clip on tank fan is a better choice to make.
Axolotls are little food monsters and will eat anything in front of them, including plants and will try to nibble on a hand or two when you're cleaning the tank (we speak from experience). The best food for adult Axolotls is earthworms or night-crawlers, these foods have all of the protein that Axolotls need. As a treat, we occasionally feed Mushu and Mulan river shrimp, so they have to hunt for the food, instead of having the food always handed to them. If the thought of this is horrifying to you don't worry, Axolotls can live happily enough on pellets, we always keep a tub of JBL NovoLotlXL pellets handy incase our batch of worms go bad!
For baby Axolotls we recommend starting with Brine Shrimp, you can check out our blog post here on how we set up our Brine Shrimp hatchery.
After about 3-4 weeks Brine Shrimp won't cut it anymore so we recommend moving onto frozen Blood Worms, these will increase growth until they are big enough to start taking chopped up earthworms.
Axolotls are very sweet little animals (basically little water dogs), some Axolotls can be very outgoing and interact with owners. (Mulan follows us around the room, whereas Mushu only cares about us when he is getting fed!).
Unfortunately, they must not be handled too much as it can cause stress and introduce infections to the Axolotl, as they have a slime coat surrounding them. An Axolotls body is mostly cartilage and they have very permeable skin, when they must be handled, it has to be very gently and carefully.
They are very rewarding pets to have and have individual personalities. I recommend everyone should own an Axolotl at least once!
]]>So! What have we been doing, this week we've just been cleaning things up more than anything, we've re-organised the website a bit so that the layout is a bit friendlier and easier to use. We've also seen that lots of people are loving the merchandise so we've expanded our Miscellaneous items to include a Plushy range! We've added a wide variety of cute plushies which we hope to expand on in the future.
Aside from this we've also finally uploaded our Brine Shrimp Hatchery video we promised a week ago (video editing is hard!) and updated the individual items on our website so that you too can build your own hatchery.
We've also tried to expand our reach a bit so we've started listing the items we have in storage here on eBay, while eBay has fees which means the prices on eBay tend to be higher than on our website, we're seeing a lot more views on individual items so hopefully it helps build our base which means we can negotiate better prices with our suppliers!
Think that's about everything for this week, next week we're hoping to have a couple posts about how to care for your fish, as well as a video about the products we use to make our fish keeping life easier!
]]>You can get a bundle with 1, 2, 4 & 7 as one - £9.99 here
We are Max & Georgie, aquarium hobbyists, true fish lovers and the team behind Fully Cycled, Kent, UK.
Our love of fish began on a holiday to Japan where we visited 4 aquariums in a week! (You could say we had some serious fishsues!)
We knew we had to bring some of this into our home lives and bought our first tank and our first pet!
Most people get a goldfish or guppies as their first pet, but no not us. We had to be different! We had to get an Axolotl! Mushu.
From Mushu, we caught the fishkeeping bug and got another tank and another and another! After Mushu, we bought Red Cherry Shrimp, Guppies, Corydoras, Pea Puffers and a Panda Garra!
After a tank upgrade for Mushu, we decided he needed a friend! So we got Mulan!
Having this many fish/ amphibians, were always on the lookout for great products that make our tanks better, be it the decor of the tank or the maintenance. So we have put all of our favourites in one place and hope you love these products as much as we do!
Take a look around our shop, social media and our up to date blog posts and do not be afraid to contact us with any queries!
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