C. cyanurus egg-laying season begins

[TJ]

Egg on Nov.1 Japan time:

Same egg on Nov. 3 (Japan time):

I suppose I'd better remove it before it gets eaten, though it's just one among many.

(Message edited by TJ on November 03, 2006)

 

[TJ]

 

[danny]

Great egg shots Tim, looks like you got the start of another busy season ahead of you! How many eggs are you expecting from this group this year? Do you plan on saving some, most, or all of the eggs? If you have way to many eggs, send them to me!

 

[TJ]

Gotcha, Danny. it's hard to guess how it'll turn out, but hopefully not like last year when I ended up with so many morphs but then so few of them survived. Here's one of the survivors, numbering about 8 in all, all of which are aquatic:

(Message edited by TJ on November 04, 2006)

 

[sylvester]

Hi Tim!
Where are you living or better: what´s the temperature of your water? My water is about 20°C.
Is it enough to get my cyanurus egg-laying?

Nice greetings from Germany,
Sylvester

(Message edited by newtlord on November 03, 2006)

 

[duncan]

Absolutely beautiful pics Tim. I can never get over the clarity of your shots. In the last pic of the juvie it doesn't even look like there's any water there. I'm sure that you've been asked many times before but what kind of camera are you using?


Thanks,
Duncan

 

[TJ]

Hi Sylvester. I'm in Japan. The water temperature is about the same as yours. If it works for me, then it should work for you...hopefully

Thanks a lot Duncan. The trick is to have a decent camera (with a decent macro lens), but more importantly to clean the tank glass (inside and outside)! I'm using a Canon 20D (at least that's what the model is called in Japan). I've had it a couple of years already, so there are even better ones on the market now. I still don't know how to operate a high-end camera properly, working with aperatures and all. To compensate, I just take a LOT of photos with slight variations, then I select the best among them and delete the rest.

I can't even figure out how to make a proper copyright mark on my Japanese-language-based keyboard. Pasting one taken from the web doesn't work either...

<font size="-2">(tail-fanning)</font>

(Message edited by TJ on November 04, 2006)

 

[TJ]

Same egg as pictured above as of Nov. 5:

 

[TJ]

And another that's further along:

 

[joseph]

Hello Tim,

Looking good! They really are blue tailed newts. As bad as it might be mind explaining what happened to the rest of the morphs? I'm guessing something went wrong with semiaquatic life?

 

[TJ]

Heya Joseph.

I'm pretty sure I covered that mess (and it was a mess!) in a previous thread but I can't find which one. Anyway, I found the ones I moved to land to be sluggish feeders and subsequently they began dying off one-by-one, though apparently not of hunger as they didn't get skinny and then die. When I moved them all to a semi-aquatic setup, they pretty much all crawled up the glass, stayed there and then I experienced mass drownings. The ones that survived are mostly the ones I never removed from a densely planted tank, the ones that were forced by circumstance to go aquatic. I don't remember all the details. I did try this and that to no avail. It's all a haze now

.

I'll be closely consulting with Ed this time around though, as I do recall him having said this in another post:

"Jen they are really easy to raise, which is why when I was talking to Henk at that IAD I was shocked to hear that this species is/was considered difficult in Europe and that a lot of the metamorphs do not survive."

Looks like I have something in common with the Europeans

(Message edited by TJ on November 04, 2006)

 

[joseph]

Hmmm. So all those allowed to be terrestrial died? I guess your survivors are those who you left in the tank and never had a chance to go terrestrial.

 

[TJ]

Of those that died, about half died when they were being kept terrestrial (whether it be on soil, paper towel or moss), while the remainder died after being moved from land to a shallow water environment with land areas and plants to crawl up on. In the case of some I kept in a container together with C. ensicauda morphs, all the C. cyanurus died while all the C. ensicauda survived. So I figured that it was either a disease that affected only C. cyanurus, or that I simply wasn't meeting their requirements, whatever those were.

(Message edited by TJ on November 05, 2006)

 

[eike]

Hello Tim!

Well, cyanurus isn't that difficult to raise in general but in my experience it certainly needs some time on land. The strange thing is, that here in Europe you never get eggs before the end of may.

 

[frank]

mmmm, my cyanurus start laying from february to september. I find this Cynops by far the easiest one to raise. I don't even give them a short terrestrial phase anymore. They stay in the water, being fed on cychlid pellets; actually, much more like goldfish than like a newt...

 

[paul]

Hi,
my two different cyanurus groups start to lay eggs, when the temperature in spring rise up to 20 °C. They also lay, when it goes down to this temperature. No terrestrial phase. But we have groups here, which do not lay fertile eggs. And the larvae seem to make more problems than other cynops.

I fear, we talk about different forms.

Paul

 

[TJ]

Thanks for the comments, Eike and Frank.

This time around, when they are about to morph, I plan to keep them in shallow water thick with vegetation, with an artificial lilly and some stacked flat rocks to climb up on, and with a couple of small open areas where worms in the water are visible from land.

Frank, are those the Tetra cychlid pellets? I've been experimenting a bit which fish pellets my C. pyrrhogaster will eat and which they won't.

Joseph, the survivors are a combination of those that I never removed to land and those that didn't drown after I removed the morphs to land and then to a semi-aquatic setup. But as to the proportion of those that were never moved to land that have survived, my memory fails me. About half, maybe.

I'd like to know, what are people's experiences with having kept the morphs terrestrially? Was there a high death rate? How were they kept and what were they fed? I found them to be very inactive, especially compared with C. ensicauda morphs, for example. They hardly moved, even when disturbed. Almost as sluggish as E. andersoni (sorry, I can only relate to what I've raised before...).

(Message edited by TJ on November 06, 2006)

 

[edward]

Hi All,

The cyanurus at work have begun to lay eggs. I egg production between the temperatures of 66-72 F (18.9-22.2 C) but I can get egg production at this temperature for as long at least 9 months if the temperature is kept relatively constant and the lighting is at least 11/13 day/night.

At home, I have a little less control of the temperatures and eggs lay is still within those paramaters but for a shorter period of time.

I have seen that about 1/3 of the eggs do not develop or only partly develop and then fungus over.

I simply keep this species with in a enclosure with a lot of plants that form surface mats and keep them cool. If you can keep them close to 66 F (18.9 C) then you should easily be able to force the majority of the larva to become aquatic simply by not feeding them anything above the water level. What you will see is that some of them will enter the water to feed and then will return to the above water perches.

Of the ones I have tried so far, cyanurus is the easiest to force to go aquatic again, with C. e. popei being the hardest and C. pyrrogaster in between...

Ed

 

[paul]

Hi Ed!
<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>Quoting Edward Kowalski on Monday 06 November 2006 - 17:29 (#POST110542):</font>

Of the ones I have tried so far, cyanurus is the easiest to force to go aquatic again, with C. e. popei being the hardest and C. pyrrogaster in between... <!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
That's an interesting observation.
I find differences between my pyrrhogaster groups from different origin!
Easy for my juvenile from Kanagawa, difficult for those from Niigata.
But usually have no problems with my C. ensicauda popei or C.e.e.
Paul

 

[paul]

Hi Tim!
<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>Quoting Tim on Monday 06 November 2006 - 05:56 (#POST110500):</font>

I'd like to know, what are people's experiences with having kept the morphs terrestrially? Was there a high death rate? How were they kept and what were they fed?<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
I kept them terrestrial for many weeks and find no difference to other Cynops.
No death!
I feed them with Thermobia domestica.
Look here:
http://de.geocities.com/archiv_cynops/Futtertiere/Ofenfische.htm
Paul