What Do Axolotls Eat?

Best foods for a pet axolotl

• Earthworms / nightcrawlers — the single best staple. Nutritionally complete, well accepted, and easy to source. Cut them to an appropriate size for your axolotl.
• Bloodworms — good for juveniles, usually frozen. More of a supplement than a staple for adults.
• Blackworms — excellent for young axolotls.
• Axolotl or sinking carnivore pellets — a convenient staple; choose a soft, sinking pellet with high protein.
• Daphnia and brine shrimp — good for very young axolotls.
• Occasional treats: small pieces of raw lean fish or shrimp, and wax worms sparingly (they're fatty).

How often to feed

• Juveniles (under about 6 months): every day, sometimes twice.
• Adults: every 2–3 days. They have slow metabolisms, and overfeeding causes bloating and fouls the water.
• Feed roughly what they'll eat in a few minutes, and remove uneaten food promptly.

What not to feed them

• Feeder fish — they commonly carry parasites and disease, and some contain thiaminase, which blocks vitamin B1 absorption.
• Hard-shelled insects like mealworms and adult crickets — the exoskeletons are hard to digest and can cause impaction.
• Beef, chicken, or other mammal meat — too fatty and poorly digested.
• Anything from a garden that may have contacted pesticides.
• Gravel-sized substrate in the tank. This isn't food, but axolotls suck in whatever is near their prey, and swallowed gravel causes fatal impaction. Use bare-bottom tanks or fine sand only.

In Minecraft (a common reason people search this): axolotls eat tropical fish, and you must feed them tropical fish in a bucket — not the item form. Feeding two axolotls tropical fish breeds them, producing a baby, and buckets of tropical fish are also used to lead them around. In the game they're neutral to players and attack most other aquatic mobs, but never attack turtles or dolphins.

Other things people usually want to know

• Do axolotls have teeth? Yes — small, blunt, vestigial teeth used to grip rather than chew. A bite from one barely registers on human skin.
• How long do axolotls live? Typically 10–15 years in captivity with good care, with some living longer. In the wild, far less.
• How big do they get? Around 9–12 inches long.
• Where do they come from? Lake Xochimilco in Mexico City — they're native to that single lake system and nowhere else in the wild.
• Are they endangered? Yes, critically endangered in the wild, with wild population estimates in the low hundreds or fewer, due to habitat loss, pollution, and introduced fish. They are, paradoxically, extremely common in captivity and in laboratories.
• Are they salamanders? Yes — axolotls are amphibians, a type of salamander that stays in its larval form for life (a trait called neoteny), keeping its feathery external gills instead of metamorphosing into a land-dwelling adult.
• Can they go on land? No. Unlike other salamanders, axolotls remain fully aquatic and should never be taken out of the water.

Two care notes that affect feeding: axolotls need cool water, around 60–68°F (16–20°C) — warm water stresses them and suppresses appetite — and they should be kept alone or with same-sized axolotls only, since they will suck at each other's gills and limbs.

A nearby question in this topic is What Do Grasshoppers Eat?.

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