An Unusual Fire Sal Dilema

[david]

A couple of my fire sals are pumping out babies and as I was cleaning out one of the baby trays I noticed something unusual. I'm feeding them live blackworms and one of the babys had a full size live blackworm coming out of it's butt. The questions would be did the blackworm crawl up it's butt or did it just not get digested and was passing through the system. Also, can this be harmful to the baby? I took a pair of tweezer to remove it, but it came out in pieces, hopefully it's all gone. So far so good. Has anyone else ever had this problem?

 

[TJ]

I've heard of blackworms and bloodworms before, but buttworms?!

I've heard that live worms can sometimes chew their way out of a newt, mealworms esp., if their heads are not...smashed...first. I'm thinking of feeding my juvies live bloodworm (they're on frozen now) and was wondering if these worms can inflict any damage. Anybody know?

Anyway, it's hard to imagine a blackworm passing through the newt's digestive system and emerging unscathed like that, but I certainly don't have the inside scoop on this. I could understand if it was an intestinal worm like a tapeworm, but...

 

[ralf]

Hi,
live bloodworms are actually a very good newt food and will not harm the animal (this includes juveniles).

Ralf

 

[david]

The larvae died. It's got to be some kind of fluke. It's never happened before and I doubt it will happen again

 

[steve]

where do you get LIVE bloodworms online?


sorry to hear Nash.

 

[TJ]

Yeah, too bad about the larvae. As for live bloodworms, I'm told you can get them (here in Japan at least) at fishing tackle/bait shops rather than at tropical fish shops. I used to be able to get them at one tropical fish shop, wrapped in moist newspaper. The newts really went for them! There's the risk of introducing diseases/parasites though...

 

[matthew_d]

Hi all,

I have no experience of blackworm and no idea about where to get live bloodworm on-line (if only!)... so I hope this is not "off-topic"... but I just wanted to put in a plug for whiteworm, one of the best sources of food for young fire sals, until they can take chopped earthworm.
To back-up Morg's recent recommendation... www.livinglunch.co.uk