feeding metamorph Red Efts

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kvbriggs

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At work a number of our Eastern Newt larvae are beginning to metamorphose into Red Efts and thus far a few have died without ever eating. Yesterday one of the newts at a single fruit fly and other foods are being tried. Do any of you have experience with young red efts or similar species and if so, how do you suggest getting them to eat?


On a side note, it's been years since I've visted these forums -- it's nice to see that it's still up and as busy as ever. My old account was axed I guess, it had been quite a while since my last post and I don't recall having had that high of a post count to begin with...

Anyway, thanks for any advice you have to offer :)
 
I have raised red efts succesfully feeding on springtails, pinhead crickets, and very very small waxmoth larvae, from a home waxmoth culture.
With very small juvenile newts I also like to add some leaf mould collected from a local woodland to the substrate being used.
This usualy contains lots of tiny insects which are readily taken by the newtlets
 
First I would suggest that you should strive to get the larvae to morph as large as possible, as larger morphs have a better chance of surviving. So feed the larvae with as much live food as they can eat.

In addition to Morg's excellent suggestions, there are a couple of other small terrestrial foods you could try. Flour beetles are easy to culture. The x-small size Phoenix worms are small enough for them. Also, some species really love fruit fly grubs.

Also, I'd recommend dusting the fruit flies, just as you would dust crickets for reptiles. I once raised a batch of efts on fruit flies (not dusted) for a year, then they all died off one by one. I suspect it was perhaps poor nutrition.
 
I've had the best luck by putting efts in springtail cultures. They're going to eat a lot of springtails, and they should always be available to them, even if you feed other things like fruit flies. I keep my springtail cultures in that expanding cocofiber stuff that comes in bricks, so I would just use a decent sized culture as the substrate for the newts, and then put baked or boiled oak leaves (to kill pathogens) on top. When I had mine (two efts), I only had to watch the moisture levels of the enclosure and to restock the springtails every month or so.
 
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