Hello to Everyone

My name is Cindy and my family and I love rough-skinned newts. Every year for my mom's birthday we'd go to a creek outside the Eugene area. We'd all go and look for newts and (if we were lucky) would catch a few and keep them as pets. Now we nearly ten adult salamanders; in fact this past year our newest female turned out to be pregnant. She laid 27 eggs! We used specific water from a pond near our house and raised the eggs until they hatched. Every week or so we'd go back to the pond and collect water for the baby newts. The ate daphnia the first few months and eventually moved on to blood worms. They've metamorphed onto land and are healthy.
The rest of our adults are healthy and are full of different personalities. Starla was caught overly obese and now is always the first to eat, while Athlete is the mother of 18 who is rather intelligent (for a newt). Mr. S loves to curl into an "S" shape and Dinosaur stands tall like a dinosaur.Our newts are healthy and happy and are loved by the whole family.
-Cindy

Cute! Seems a lot of us here are from Oregon

Thanks Cindy. I'm so glad you finally our family newt pictures on this site! Indeed, our family is a bit "newt obsessed". And our newts really do have personalities as varied as their looks ("Starla" the fat female versus Dinosar the thin active climber. See Cindy's pictures!).

And our guys are really very tame. They will eat from our hands and come to the side of their tubs waiting ( begging?) for food. Some of our newts, we have had quite a while ...Starla for over 6 years, for example. As Cindy explained, we also have 18 morphed "babies" now in land phase ( hatched July 24 2011, so they are now 8 months old and growing). 18 babies is not what we planned on, but, hey, we have them and much to our surprise, they are doing amazingly well for the large number we have.

The babies live in a large pile of artificial silk-like aquarium leaves ( artificial leaves stay fresh and are very easy to clean). We rinse out the leaves daily to keep the environment sanitary. Right after "rinsing time" comes "feeding time" and the babies will come out of the leaf pile in "hunting" phase crawling around and searching for food right after they are cleaned (the babies know the routine!)

I will try to post an updated picture of our babies soon. We are so proud of our " family".

Jane