MBD questions?

[cameron]

Hi all. One of Chinese Firebelly newts has what I am 95% sure is metabolic bone disease. It hasn't eaten for a month now until last night it finally ate a bunch of termites. I though it wasn't going to live long once it stopped eating a month ago. Its leg was completely eaten away so that had only had three but it made an amazing recovery and is growing back its entire leg.

Eventually I will try to get him interested into earthworms.

The questions are will the disease eventually kill it? Can it be cured? How can I help it?

 

[ester]

Limb rot is not the same thing as metabolic bone disease. What makes you think it's MBD?

 

[cameron]

It is sort of a crippled newt. It has a curved body and tail and does not straighten out well when it walks. There was not a fungus taking over his leg. It basically shrunk to nothing and grew back. It was pretty weird.

(Message edited by slimy on February 04, 2007)

 

[jennifer]

At this point, the best you can do is to really "baby it" to get it to eat every day. Give it whatever it wants, and try to teach it to feed from a toothpick or tweezers.

There may be other reasons besides MBD for a newt being somewhat crippled - has it always been this way? When a foot/leg shrinks away it is caused by some sort of infection, but the infection is not always visible. Sounds like your newt succeeded in stopping it and regrowing the leg.

 

[cameron]

It has always been this way and I feed it from tweezers. I hand feed the other one. I could probably hand feed it a few earthworms but I am having a hard time getting worms right now. It's pretty cold out here and digging has been weakly successful. The logs are frozen and I can't find more termites right now, although I did give him all that I had left today.

I do have some small weevils but I don't know if I should give him them.

I just came inside from trying to dig up some worms. They are scarce and the petstores don't sell anything except for crickets and waxworms.