jbaker8484
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- Jul 22, 2014
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- Location
- Santa Rosa, CA
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I've been having problems with my Notophthalmus viridescens dying on me over the past year. It all happens the same way.
First, I notice strange gunk stuff clinging to their legs and body. It kind of looks like they are shedding, but it never goes away. I can see the newts trying to bite the stuff off but it always comes back.
Second, the newts start to float around. I rarely see my newts floating. But these newts will float around on the surface and barely move.
Finally they seem to just wither away and die.
I originally had 3 wild caught newts. One of them never did too well, was always skinny. This one broke it's tail and had the above symptoms, died eventually. Unfortunate, but I didn't think too much it at the time.
Later I bought 3 more eastern newts from a reptile store in Berkeley. I think these were a different regional variant, different coloring.
2 of the new newts died and one of the original newts died within a couple weeks, leaving me with one original newt and one new newt.
The remaining new newt was doing fine for several months but randomly started experiencing the symptoms I described and died within a week.
Now I'm down to one of the original newts, a large and healthy male.
Any ideas what is going on here? After all of this I'm really hesitant to buy another newt.
My tank seems plenty healthy, good ammonia and nitrate levels, lots of plants, some driftwood, average about a 30% water change twice a week. The water PH here is like 8.2+ if that matters. All of this happened over the winter and spring when the water temperature hovered around 65 degrees. 30 gallon tank, pretty low bioload.
First, I notice strange gunk stuff clinging to their legs and body. It kind of looks like they are shedding, but it never goes away. I can see the newts trying to bite the stuff off but it always comes back.
Second, the newts start to float around. I rarely see my newts floating. But these newts will float around on the surface and barely move.
Finally they seem to just wither away and die.
I originally had 3 wild caught newts. One of them never did too well, was always skinny. This one broke it's tail and had the above symptoms, died eventually. Unfortunate, but I didn't think too much it at the time.
Later I bought 3 more eastern newts from a reptile store in Berkeley. I think these were a different regional variant, different coloring.
2 of the new newts died and one of the original newts died within a couple weeks, leaving me with one original newt and one new newt.
The remaining new newt was doing fine for several months but randomly started experiencing the symptoms I described and died within a week.
Now I'm down to one of the original newts, a large and healthy male.
Any ideas what is going on here? After all of this I'm really hesitant to buy another newt.
My tank seems plenty healthy, good ammonia and nitrate levels, lots of plants, some driftwood, average about a 30% water change twice a week. The water PH here is like 8.2+ if that matters. All of this happened over the winter and spring when the water temperature hovered around 65 degrees. 30 gallon tank, pretty low bioload.
