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Tiger Salamander recover suggestions

Panhandler

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Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum, so here's a my backstory: I have a pair of tiger salamanders that I found in the wild in 2006. They live in a terrarium with coco coir and smooth river pebbles plus a water bowl. I typically hand feed them each one large nightcrawler per week.

Current situation: I was feeding them this weekend, and one of them ate a small pebble. After researching online, I tried gently pushing the pebble back up to his throat. The process took a few hours because he was pretty uncooperative, and I ended up putting him in a tub of water in the fridge for about 90 minutes during the ordeal in an effort to calm him down. In the end, he successfully coughed it back out, no blood or anything.

He seems fine today but I imagine that there must have been at least some minor injury to his digestive tract. So moving forward, I have a couple questions:

1) How long should I wait before feeding him?

2) I've read about fridging for axolotls. Is that a good idea for a recovering tiger salamander as well?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can offer!
 

Panhandler

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Re: Tiger Salamander recovery suggestions

So I figured I'd update my post for the sake of posterity.
I waited 5 days before feeding him, and he recovered just fine without any fridging. He's acting and eating normally.

To go into a little further detail about the procedure of pushing the rock back out:
First, I gently prodded around the belly until I located the stone. Then, I found that using my thumb and index fingers on his flanks was the most effective method of forcing the stone back up through his digestive track. I tried to pace the movement of the stone about the same as he would swallow a nightcrawler. Once I got it up between his arms, he started gagging and I could see it in the back of his throat. I just kept steady gentle pressure behind the stone to keep it from going back down, letting him actually cough it out instead of trying to reach in and grab it with the forceps that I had bought.

The stone was slightly smaller than an average marble and just as smooth. I imagine bigger and/or jagged edges would escalate the decision on amount and duration of recovery necessary.

Cheers
 
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