I feel like I could jump into this talk. ... I guess a forum is for posting hehe.
I also love the 1-2cm water + moss method. First photo shows moss in flat water, full of worms. The box is about 25x15cm big and is the home of two cynops e. popei efts. They experience pretty good growth speed, the worms and snails are also happy and multiply. I change the water when it smells, looks intransparent, if I see too many uneaten bloodworms (I still feed extra), or otherwise every few days.
Most leftover food is actually eaten up by the other invertebrates and doesn't leave much residue.
Daphnia can also survive in this for a while. There are water isopods too. I see some snail eggs there. In short, I believe this box contains many things that a newt likes to eat, at minimal maintenance. I don't know what worm species that is, it lived in the garden pond.
I tried to breed tubifex, but barely even managed to keep them alive. Meanwhile this random worm just multiplies at no effort.
When the newts have grown a bit, it's also easy to throw some callosobruchus maculatus (chinese bean bug) at them. However, I think too many of those bugs stress the newts. .. it even seems that the bugs have a tendency to crawl over newts and sit on the newts eyes, and, I do believe they do that because they drink some of their eye fluid. So... a few are fine, but not so many that the newts get a heart attack. I found them the most easy to breed land food insect. Just a bucket of dry beans, no spraying needed (in fact, don't spray at it, the beans will mold).
When the newts are a bit bigger, they get transferred to tanks with higher water levels (and of course some land parts). An aquarium sponge like for filters is an easy way to create a kind of stairway for the water level, if you don't care about aesthetics.
Now... I've been battling with myself if I should post about the next thing because not everyone will agree with it, but... so far I have had 0 casualties in it, and the newts are growing, so it can't be that terribly wrong. It's essentially the same setup, but gone a bit dark.
So I have another box, housing my cynops orientalis efts..... however, this second, bigger box didn't get any light shined on it, the moss died, the leaves and coco mat degrade over time. So... it pretty much turned into some kind of underwater compost heap.
And then something happened... Psychoda grisescens laid larvae in it: It's a "toilet fly", attracted by the smell of excrements. It's about 2mm big without wings. I think I can honestly say that the box wasn't really smelling of excrements so I guess the smell of old decomposing leaves did the trick for it.
The fly is considered a carrier of potentially harmful bacteria for humans so you don't want these in your normal rooms. But seeing them in the box, I thought again... well, whatever lives in there already, doesn't need any special conditions for it, and newts eat everything that wiggles, right? So I just went along with it.
I apply the same rules here, change the water if intransparent, smells funny or dead food in it, otherwise about every 3 days... so it's not the garbage dump that it looks like. I know it looks bleak, the box really wouldn't win a beauty contest. I think what's wiggling there is the fly's larvae all over the place. I'm pretty sure they eat them. I still feed extra.
Soooo I'm not saying this is the best setup ever, but it's something that works for me at very low effort.
