Cut earthworms turn axolotl feeding into an accounting problem. A whole worm is easy to score, eaten or not eaten, but a worm in pieces, offered to an animal that sucks food in and sometimes spits it back out, leaves the keeper guessing whether dinner was five pieces or two. The answer is a small tally kept during the feed itself, built from three counts that never change, so that swallowed stops being an impression and becomes arithmetic.
Tong-Feed Piece by Piece
The tally starts with how the food is offered. Offer each piece singly by tong, placing it in front of the axolotl and waiting for the quick suction strike before offering the next. Piece by piece matters because it makes every piece a countable event: you know exactly how many went toward the animal, and you can watch what happens to each one instead of dropping in a handful and losing track in the swirl. Cut pieces to a size it can take comfortably, since oversized pieces are the ones most often spat back out, and pause between pieces so it can swallow and settle. Those few extra minutes are the entire cost of knowing, rather than hoping, what it ate.
The Three-Part Tally
Keep exactly three counts for each feed, and keep them the same every time: pieces put in, the pieces spat back out counted next, and last the pieces left uneaten. Swallowed is never counted directly; it is the remainder once the spat and leftover counts come off the number that went in. A worked example shows the whole method: Tuesday's feed had eight pieces go in, two spat back out, and one piece left uneaten on the substrate, giving five pieces swallowed. The three parts must stay identical in every record, because the tally only becomes useful across feeds if each feed is scored the same way; a record that sometimes merges spat and left pieces, or sometimes counts offered handfuls instead of pieces put in, cannot be compared with the feeds around it. Watch the spat count with particular care: an axolotl suddenly spitting out pieces it used to take may be finding them too large or going off its food, and the tally turns that suspicion into a pattern.
Clear the Leftovers, Record the Feed
Close each feed the same way. Remove what was spat back out and anything left uneaten promptly, with tongs or a siphon, so the counts stay honest, nothing uneaten is eaten later off the record, and scraps do not foul the water as they break down. Then record the tally right after the feed while the three counts are fresh, rather than reconstructing them at the end of the week. Read across the records weekly: a steady run of similar counts is a healthy picture, a gradual slide says portions or piece size may need adjusting, and a sudden drop held over several feeds is worth raising with a vet as an observed history. Because the tally is per feed and always in the same three parts, that conversation starts from numbers, not from a feeling that the axolotl has seemed less interested lately.
The Tally Lives in the Passport
A tally kept on loose notes drifts apart within a month. In KinsLe, the axolotl's Pet Passport is the portable packet where its records are held together, and entering each feed's three-part tally there keeps the whole feeding history in one place, in one format, ready to be read feed by feed or shared at a vet visit without reassembly. The record for each feed carries the same three counts, in the same order, with the swallowed figure that follows from them, so a month of feeding can be scanned in a moment.
Filed per feed in your Pet Passport on KinsLe, the put-in, spat-out, and left-uneaten counts turn guesswork about appetite into a record a vet can read.