Nemesor Jack
New member
Back in the 90's, petsmart used to sell "firebelly" newts. I had always wanted some, and when I finally got an apartment with no roomates to wreck things, I built a 125 gallon fish tank out of acrylic.
And being a younger guy with no/very limited internet access, I threw everything I ever wanted in there. It was awesome. For a while.
Eventually the pleco and the crayfish ate all the plants, the neon tetras all grew fuzzy, and the newts kept dying. Everything else did fine though. Water quality was perfect. Temp was nice and warm - it was Florida and I had several hundred watts of lights for the plants - didn't even *need* a heater....
So I did some research and found out petsmart was selling cold water animals in a tropical hell hole. Whoops.
The surviving half dozen newts relocated to a ten gallon and I rotated out frozen water bottles. For years. That sucked and some more eventually died.
When small solid state chillers became available, I drilled and cracked several ten-gal aquariums only to find the chiller didn't work that great. So the surviving two newts lived with a chiller and ice bottles for a few more years. Then one of them disappeared. I found it 4 years later when I moved out, mummified in a closet.
The last newt was a champ, and I wish I could have bred him. He survived until 2014 when a power outage (in the Florida summer) killed him and all of the latest batch of neons. I wanted more, but by that point, newts were hard to find. Also, I didn't want to go through another darwinian (lower case on purpose) process to get some heat-tolerant coldwater pets. I looked around for warm-water newts, but the closest I could find were all too big for my tastes. And still not really warm water. In Florida, the residential air conditioners cannot keep up with late afternoon summer, so house temperatures usually get up into the 80's whether you want them there or not. I am sure someone will dispute that, but that was my experience, and the experience of my friends and family. And as long as we weren't in formal dress, it was ok. 80's is just fine in your boxers and flip flops - the traditional Florida garb. Now you know why Florida man is always half-naked in the news stories.
I recently moved a thousand miles north and have a nice basement where the temperature hangs around 55 in naturally evolved F units (13 in elitist desk jockey C units). So time for newts again!
I was going to get a batch of cynop orientalis and start breeding them, because I think that is probably what petsmart sold me back in the day, but discovered cynops cyanurus thanks to youtube. A temperate water newt just about the right size! I could keep these guys on my desk upstairs! I wish I had known about them back in Florida.
And then a few months later, Amazonas magazine did a story on them. Crrraaaaapp. I imagine demand for them has probably gone up a bit, and they weren't easy to find in the first place. So here I am, dutifully writing five (mostly) non-spam posts to prove my forum cred.... So I can start spamming "WTB C. Cyanurus babies!" in the grown-up threads. All day and all night. So there we go. Five posts posted. Hopefully they'll remove the "new" tag from my profile now. After 10 years.
And being a younger guy with no/very limited internet access, I threw everything I ever wanted in there. It was awesome. For a while.
Eventually the pleco and the crayfish ate all the plants, the neon tetras all grew fuzzy, and the newts kept dying. Everything else did fine though. Water quality was perfect. Temp was nice and warm - it was Florida and I had several hundred watts of lights for the plants - didn't even *need* a heater....
So I did some research and found out petsmart was selling cold water animals in a tropical hell hole. Whoops.
The surviving half dozen newts relocated to a ten gallon and I rotated out frozen water bottles. For years. That sucked and some more eventually died.
When small solid state chillers became available, I drilled and cracked several ten-gal aquariums only to find the chiller didn't work that great. So the surviving two newts lived with a chiller and ice bottles for a few more years. Then one of them disappeared. I found it 4 years later when I moved out, mummified in a closet.
The last newt was a champ, and I wish I could have bred him. He survived until 2014 when a power outage (in the Florida summer) killed him and all of the latest batch of neons. I wanted more, but by that point, newts were hard to find. Also, I didn't want to go through another darwinian (lower case on purpose) process to get some heat-tolerant coldwater pets. I looked around for warm-water newts, but the closest I could find were all too big for my tastes. And still not really warm water. In Florida, the residential air conditioners cannot keep up with late afternoon summer, so house temperatures usually get up into the 80's whether you want them there or not. I am sure someone will dispute that, but that was my experience, and the experience of my friends and family. And as long as we weren't in formal dress, it was ok. 80's is just fine in your boxers and flip flops - the traditional Florida garb. Now you know why Florida man is always half-naked in the news stories.
I recently moved a thousand miles north and have a nice basement where the temperature hangs around 55 in naturally evolved F units (13 in elitist desk jockey C units). So time for newts again!
I was going to get a batch of cynop orientalis and start breeding them, because I think that is probably what petsmart sold me back in the day, but discovered cynops cyanurus thanks to youtube. A temperate water newt just about the right size! I could keep these guys on my desk upstairs! I wish I had known about them back in Florida.
And then a few months later, Amazonas magazine did a story on them. Crrraaaaapp. I imagine demand for them has probably gone up a bit, and they weren't easy to find in the first place. So here I am, dutifully writing five (mostly) non-spam posts to prove my forum cred.... So I can start spamming "WTB C. Cyanurus babies!" in the grown-up threads. All day and all night. So there we go. Five posts posted. Hopefully they'll remove the "new" tag from my profile now. After 10 years.
