Can this be healthy?

Hi my name is Jamie. I am the proud mother of three Tiger salamanders, three Cockteils, and three Fuzhong Fire Bellied newts. My question is about the newts. I watched my female eat her own feceis. I clean their tank every day, and it seems as though there is never anything in her part of the tank. Is a bad sign? She has had a little trouble sinking, is this related? Does anyone know? Please help a distressed mother.

Is it possible that she was actually eating her shed skin, not feces? They often eat their skin, but I've never seen a newt eat feces. What are you feeding them?

I have been feeding them newt and salamander bites. And yeah, it was feces. I saw it as she ate it. The poop had already broken up and she pounced on it like it was a bleeding worm. Will this make her sick?

I don't know what effect this would have on the animal's health. But I'd suggest substituting some real "bleeding worms" in place of the newt bites. I know that in mammals, eating feces can be a symptom of malnutrition.

The newt bites do not have enough in them for a newts nutritional needs. I'd suggest earth worms, or other live food... but be ware. Make sure you can keep feeding them live food (ie your source won't run out) because once they are fed live food there's no going back (in my experience).

I have no problem alternating frozen and live foods at home and at work.

I'll have to look at the analysis of the newt bites to see what it has in them.

Ed

I bought the HBH newt bites too and if you read the ingredients, they are full of "fillers" (corn meal, fish meal, flour, pea powder....not the most nutritious stuff. My newts love live blackworms (and have gotten rather soiled on them). I've found they don't respond as well to other things (frozen blood worms), but they will eat them. Try those, you can find frozen blood worms in pet stores and a good shop will also carry live blackworms.

Off the cuff, I would have to point out that these are digestiable fillers and I am not sure why they are not being considered nutritious.

Ed

I found this article on this site which rated food sources; it lists lots of freeze dried and pellet foods as fair or poor sources of nutrition for newts.

http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/foods.shtml

all caudates are entirely carnivorous from the day they are born. any food containing cereal or vegetable matter is alien to them and should not be given. in order to remain in a good state of health they should be given a varied and as close to natural as possible diet. if people find this difficult to provide purely out of convenience, perhaps they're better off with a hamster. after all these creatures have taken millenia to evolve in order to fill a particular niche in nature.

Despite the the nutritional impact, who can get a newt to "bite" the "newt bites" pellets....I think they are a poor choice all around due to the simple fact most species I have kept never went for them. I use Ragen sinking pellets and most of the species I have ate them readily.
It's good to try different foods (live, frozen, pellet) in order to know what they will eat, so if one food source dries up temporarily, you have another to fall back on. I have heard colonies kept at universities and zoo's being fed one or two food types to captive caudates that lived for years.
I believe that article was written a while back and was only referring to 2 types of pellet foods. There are commercial soft, sinking, fish pellets used for bottom feeding fish that are easily taken by aquatic caudates. Trout chow was a popular one years ago(I don't think it was soft) and some aquatic species accepted it. I like how the author rates beef heart, which I hold a different opinion. I would like to see the research on the effects of mammalian protein and caudates in regard to fat deposits (why this is a physiologic "hazard"). I thought caudates had ways to store fat in times of abundance for future times of diminished food supply.

snip "all caudates are entirely carnivorous from the day they are born." endsnip

True
snip "any food containing cereal or vegetable matter is alien to them and should not be given endsnip

Not true, if you look at the literature for contents of digestive tracts of caudates (and aquatic species in particular) you will discover that plant matter is often accidently ingested when feeding. Now it is true that plant matter ingested in this fashion is poorly digested by carnivores as they lack the necessary enzymes/symbiotes to break down the plant's cell walls however this is not a problem with pellets which are extruded as the extrusion process will rupture all of the cell walls.
This disruption allows the protiens in the plants to be made available to the newts. As plant protiens just like animal protiens are made up of amino acid chains in various forms, they respond to digestion allowing for the caudate to gain nutrition from the pellet. This is why I have to disagree about there being no nutrition in the pellet. Now I will agree that these pellets may not be sufficiently palatable that the animals will eat them, but this doesn't have any bearing on how nutritious the pellet is for the newt.

I am aware of caudates in Zoo collections being maintained on a sole diet of crickets for more than ten years.

Okay, the mammalian protein issue, this is a issue that is often debated on many forums with the statments that amphibians have problems digesting mammal protiens. As I pointed out above, animal protien is animal protien, amphibians digest it just fine and many Zoos and other institutions have used it as either part or the entire diet for different amphibians (including caudates and caecilians) for many years. (It seems to me the further back you go in the literature the more common it was). The real issue started over the usage of pinkies as a staple in amphibian diets about 20 years ago when anurans that were fed unsupplemented diets that were high in pinkies raised on commercial diets developed corneal lipidosis and/or metabolic bone disease. This was then incorporated as common dogma of feeding pinkies will kill your amphibian. The point that people (often still) do not accept is that these issues are also often seen in anurans that have been on an insect only diet and have never been fed mammalian meat. When you look at the nutritional analysis of pinks (as I am more familiar with the info than beef heart) versus the commercially available feeder insects you will see that on a KCAL basis pinks are no worse a food item than crickets or some of the other commonly used feeders. The problem is a husbandry problem in that the pinks (and this would apply to other mammalian meat sources) mass more than a cricket of the same size and consequently the amphibians are overfed as they are usually offered a comparable amount of pinkies by size to what the animal would normally consume in crickets (etc) and at the same frequency. A pinkie the same size as an adult cricket may mass the same as 4 adult crickets of the same size so the real issue is overfeeding and resulting obesity is the problem, not that they have problems digesting it....

Ed

yeah, point taken. but theres a major difference in accidental ingestion and deliberately feeding it to them. a 3 year old kid may well accidentally ingest a coin or a ball bearing, but you wouldn't make it his staple diet now would you.i would have no problem with feeding pikie mice as an occaisional variation. but like i said theres no excuse for providing a poor diet for animals. wheres the difficulty in going out and collecting a few worms or sweepings from a patch of long grass and alternating these with shop bought frozen or live food. i mean we ruin our own diet by eating pre-packed rubbish and mc donalds etc. i don't think we should be showing the same lack of respect for our newts. if most people watched the manufacture of half of the food that they eat, maybe they would eat their own faeces

Other than the palatability issue, I have not seen any data or discussion yet that indicates why these are improper foods.
Except that coins and ball bearings are not digestiable at all and there is a significant difference between the excessive fats and empty calories in the diets of todays' people and using a prepared product that aquires a significant portion of its protien from plant based sources. No one here is saying that caudates eat plants, however they can digest plant protiens if the cell walls have been broken down. You are comparing apples and oranges and apples and cantalopes here not apples and apples. If you want to discuss high fat diets then we really do not have to look much further than some of the feeder insects used for the animals in our care.
Plant based sources of protiens can be every bit as nutritious and digestiable as animal protiens even for carnivores like caudates.. There can be problems when using plants as the sole source of protien as it is possible to run into amino acid deficiencies such as those seen in cats that are fed diets that lack animal protiens but the addition of the fish meal and that not all of the plant protien comes from one source takes care of that concern.

In addition to the accidental ingestion when feeding your point excludes the gut contents of the food items which are masiticated and partially digested allowing for assimilation of the plant matter by the carnivore.

Ed

The HBH salamander and newt bites are almost identical to the Rangen salmon pellets used by the former Indiana University Axolotl Colony (Now the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center). The nutritional analysis and the ingredients are nearly the same. I would guess that HBH probably got the idea for this product from looking at what the colony was using on their website.

Rangen (Colony) soft moist pellets: Crude protein - 44%, Crude Fat - 18%, Fiber < 5%, Ash < 8%.

HBH Newt and Salamander Bites: Crude Protein - 45%, Crude Fat - 19%, Fiber < 3%, Ash < 8%.

Rangen main ingredients - Fish (Anchovy meal), Wheat Feed Flour, Blood Meal, Fish Oil.

HBH Main ingredients - Anchovy meal, Krill meal, Dried Squid, Fish Oil, Blood Meal, Wheat Flour.

Fish meal is not a filler, it's made the parts of the fish left over from processing for human consumption, and is extensively used in fish foods.

Personally, I have been feeding my axolotls exclusively on the HBH bites since they were small larvae, and they are now 6 inch sub-adults.

(Message edited by lollia on January 21, 2006)

the gut content of feeder animals is unavoidable. and although you are quite correct about the assimilation of vegetable proteins when in a "pre=digested form, i personally would much prefer my animals to eat a natural diet or at least untill more long term testing has been done. and admittedly new products have to be tryed on salamanders in order to test their edibility, but not on mine. wheres the difficulty in providing worms and insects.i wonder why zoos don't start feeding lions and tigers on these pellets, if they're just as nutritious as meat, surely vegetable matter would be much cheaper to produce. perhaps they would find them unpalatable(much the same as newts?)and start eating their own faeces

This is sort of a moot issue regarding vegetable matter. As I have shown, the newt bites don't actually have any vegetable matter in them.

The wheat flour is probably just used to bind the proteins together.

my apologies lauren. you typed and posted your message before i could even type mine(i'm not very good at typing)i was replying to ed. i'm probably out of my depth here anyway, as i have no experience with any of the newt or salamander bites. but i must say the nutritional analysis you gave seems much more palatable than was described earlier in this thread.

We actually did feeding trials at work with the large carnivores and pelleted diets. The problem wasn't that the pelleted diets were not accepted but that when you purchase the quantity of meat a large Zoo uses, pelleted foods are actually more expensive than the meat...

Given that the axolotl colony uses basically the same pellet by a different maker for its long term use, is a pretty good indication of its long-term safety.

If you were over here on the East Coast, I'd invite you to stop International Amphibian Day where (unless the scheduling has changed) I'll be doing a workshop on amphibian nutrition and what we don't know..

I was actually referring to the pea powder and not the fish meal as a filler.

Ed

(Message edited by Ed on January 21, 2006)

I'm in agreement with Ed and Lauren. I went through various texts on Amphibian biology, and they don't mention food options as "good vs. bad". The digestive system breaks down all food into digestible components wether a pellet or an inscect. Chitin is one component that is not digested. I agree with Ed, when speaking of mammalian protein as a sole source of diet, over feeding is a concern. When looking at a food source, we look at the caloric value verses the expenditure of energy used in capturing/preying the food choice. It makes sense that I have to go through tons of fruit fly cultures with my Cynops p. metamorphes to get a growth rate when I feed black worms in smaller portions and in less feedings. It appears the newtlings expended more energy with capturing the fruitflies than the black worms. Frutflies can still be a option as a food source, but with some modifications.
Enticing the caudates to eat the food choices is just as important. I think the Newt bites may not trigger the same smell receptors as the Ragen pellets. I remember one keeper used to store them in a container with dry (smelly) cat food and found his pets were more likely to eat them. If you have specimens that relish them, I think thats great. All in all, the best food is the one that your pets are eager to eat, is readily available, and affordable. Every food has its advantages and disadvantages. Some soil the water faster, or loose potency (aroma) while in water (IE: frozen blood worms)
When I supplement beef heart in some of my caudates diet, it appears to give them a caloric boost that is particularly favorable during breeding and egg laying. Night crawlers pieces is another high caloric food choice, but seems to have a higher water content, which could mean lesser protein content.
I think it should also be mentioned that this goes along with how frequent one should feed their caudate. It would depend on caloric needs (temperature/size/breeding/egg laying as variable factors) verses the caloric impact of the food choice. We basically give it our best shot, and realize over feeding is a possibility while they are kept in captivity.
I'm still trying to figure out the pysiological effect of over feeding (fat storage), in relationship to breeding and overall health. I have blamed over feeding to why my T. carnifex did not breed a while back. It could also be they were not mature enough to do so.
BTW, has anyone used or is using Trout Chow? I was never able to find one suitable in terms of sinking and soft, like Ragen.