T. pygmaeus

Hi all, some snaps of my T. pygmaeus for your enjoyment. The larvae are this years and doing very well now - I had a disaster with an earlier batch due to low oxygen during a sunny spell (I think). I've now installed an air pump and they're doing very well on a Daphnia diet.

Picture of proud mum also attached (actually I think she's just hoping for the next worm). Both my females are very tame and/or greedy depending on your point of view, taking slugs, worms and even dried food from my finger. Actually, they'll strike at my finger if I put it in the water. The males are a bit shyer and generally have to be coaxed a bit more, but are also hand tame.

Tristan

TristanH said:

Hi all, some snaps of my T. pygmaeus for your enjoyment. The larvae are this years and doing very well now - I had a disaster with an earlier batch due to low oxygen during a sunny spell (I think). I've now installed an air pump and they're doing very well on a Daphnia diet.

Picture of proud mum also attached (actually I think she's just hoping for the next worm). Both my females are very tame and/or greedy depending on your point of view, taking slugs, worms and even dried food from my finger. Actually, they'll strike at my finger if I put it in the water. The males are a bit shyer and generally have to be coaxed a bit more, but are also hand tame.

Tristan

Click to expand...

Nice update. What are the sizes of your adults?

Steve, the females are about 6cm snout-vent, 11cm including tail (hard to get an exact measurement as they wriggle a lot). I've had them for about a year now and they haven't grown in that time.

Do you have 'normal' marbleds? How do they compare?

Tristan

those are some great shots of the larvae! how did you get such contrast?

Awww! Those tadpole-style larvae are so cute! He probably put something black behind it for the photos.

The common name for this one is Pygmy Crested, right? She's pretty.

I took these photos in the dark, but turned off the flash as this doesn't give a nice effect. I used a torch for lighting, shining it from the side of the aquarium so there wasn't too much reflection. The torch doesn't quite give enough light to illuminate them fully, but by underexposing the photos a bit, I managed to get a useable shutter speed (around 1/45 sec). I then compensated a bit for the underexposure by using the levels function on my photo processing software (nothing fancy, just iPhoto).

Tristan

TristanH said:

Steve, the females are about 6cm snout-vent, 11cm including tail (hard to get an exact measurement as they wriggle a lot). I've had them for about a year now and they haven't grown in that time.

Do you have 'normal' marbleds? How do they compare?

Tristan

Click to expand...

My normal Marbled are immature and only about 85mm total length

As you can see the largest larvae are getting pretty big now (sorry for the poor quality pic). They are very greedy (I believe all Triturus are?) and are not above taking bites out of each others' gills. Fortunately all can breathe air now as well, so this doesn't seem a big problem. They are fed on a diet of mayfly larvae, freshwater shrimp, bloodworms and other wrigglers I collect from our local moorland stream. They seem to do very well on this and are as fat as carp!

In the last few days I've noticed that their tail fin crest is starting to get noticeably lower, and they're developing an orange vertebral stripe (visible on the photo). I suspect they may start to emerge in the next month or so. Fingers crossed....

Tristan

Hey, nice pics and nice newts. Used to have these, mine were really shy, agile, quick and superb climbers. Nice to see that someone is breeding them. Beautiful newts.