Newbie from Oklahoma

[Muppit]

Hello all,

Just joined the forums as I just recently acquired my first sallies. I rescued 5 of them from a rapidly disappearing man-made pond that my wife's grandparent's have on their farm in the panhandle of OK.

The pond that they built years ago dried out last summer due to the excessive heat wave, had to be drug out due to filling up with tumble weeds after drying out, and subsequently had its layer of waterproof soil damaged to the point that it could no longer hold water.

Despite that they tried to fill it back up this summer by pumping well water into it for about a month before we arrived in the hopes that my 4 yr old niece would have a pond to play in.

The water wouldn't hold and resulted in a pond totally absent of fish and no deeper than 4 feet in existence for a solid month. I later came to find that this is basically an ideal environment for a salamander breeding area.

Anyway, they stopped pumping the water when we arrived, and, by the second day of our visit the water had drained/evaporated down to 2-6 inches. This allowed my to see literally dozens and dozens of sallies in their aquatic larval stage. Our best educated guess is that they are Tiger salamanders. We brought five of them home with us and they have recently morphed into their more terrestrial juvenile stage and are developing their more adult colorings, this has almost confirmed that they are indeed tiger salamanders.

I'm still learning a lot everyday about raising them but am hoping to be able to bring them all into adulthood.

[Otterwoman]

Welcome! Tigers are a very popular captive and you should be able to learn anything you need to at this site. Enjoy!