Question: One of my T. marmoratus died

I woke up this morning to find one of my marmoratus alive, and the other one not so much.


I'm not sure why it passed. Does anybody know what happened?

the first photo is the set-up I had them in. I previously had them in a soil set up with leaf litter, plants, and hides ...but I moved them to paper towel in order to monitor their feeding as I felt they were having trouble finding their food.

I had been feeding both fruit flies, small isopods, and little kenyan roach juveniles. I also put in tiny worm pieces, but they were refused.
They had a water bowl with water.

Second photo is the dead one, it looks very thin to me. Is it possible it wasn't finding food? Did it dessicate?


The tank was drier today morning than it should be, but still fairly moist in the paper towels. The water in the bowl had dried out but there was wet moss and moisture underneath the hides.


The remaining one is now in a kritter keeper with some moss and hides. I'm planning on keeping it on fruit flies.

Also, what should I do with the dead body?
What went wrong? What should I do differently? I would like to learn from this ordeal.

thanks in advance,
-- Advyth

Inexplicably losing animals is one of the great frustrations of this hobby.

Otterwoman said:

Inexplicably losing animals is one of the great frustrations of this hobby.

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Absolutely this. Sometimes an animal will just die, with no evidence of why. It will happen to us all.

If this is the person from the dart frog Facebook group that marm didn't look health from the picture I saw. It was skinny. I have gotten newts to recover from the way that one looked by feeding them high protein foods to increase their weight faster.

Blackstar65 -- I'm not on any dart frog group, that's a different person I think :happy:


Thank you Methos5K and Otterwoman. The other marm is doing fine, I am hand feeding it to make sure it gets enough food. It's weight looks good.

Methos5K said:

Absolutely this. Sometimes an animal will just die, with no evidence of why. It will happen to us all.

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Bear in mind that you can (in many places) get the animal post-mortem examined - it costs, but can provide very useful information. Maybe not even just for the person involved, but if enough people did it we could learn more about common causes of death in captive amphibs.

I had that same thing happen to me with one of my t. marms. I have had luck feeding terrestrial newts blackworms on a wet paper towel. The blackworms squiggle around and the newts eat right off the paper or tweezers if you can. The blackworms are great for nutrition. Best of luck.