Does Belly Color Fade Over Time?

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TLaw

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I have 3 CFB's, two I've had for about and a bit, the third since October. I assume the one I got in October is younger, because it's considerably smaller than the others (like 5.5 cm compared to 7.5 and 8.5cm). Anyway, the "older" two have orange bellies while I chose the smaller one when I bought him because his belly was more of a red color. However, over the last few months he's grown, but at the same I think his belly color might be lightening to orange like the others.

Is this how CFBs are normally colored? Red when young then slowly fading to orange? Or is there some other cause, like diet? I feed my guys blood worms and brine shrimp.

Is there anyway to stop this color change, or reverse it? Because I really liked the red belly, it was unique compared to every other CFB I've ever seen.
 
It´s perfectly normal because the red colour comes from carotenes ingested with the diet. If the diet they have in captivity lacks carotenes (specially canthaxantine), then the pigment in their xantophores can´t be reinforced and overtime it fades away.
The way to prevent this decoloration is to provide a carotene-rich diet.
 
Yes, it's normal like A. said. But that fading of the colour takes years. Feeding with Daphnia and Artemia will help to get the orange/red belly back. Also Cantaxantine will give a nice red belly in a few weeks.
 
Canthaxanthin is a naturally ocurring carotene that appears in many crustaceans (and many other organisms). Gammarids, Daphnia, copepods, artemia, etc, all contain carotenes such as canthaxanthin or astaxanthin which the newt´s methabolism uses to store in the xanthophores.

Apart from the natural sources of these carotenes, there are also comercial products such as NektonRep-Color which have high concentrations of them and can be administered with the food. You can have amazing and very fast results with these products, but they have to be used carefully.
 
Azhael said:
You can have amazing and very fast results with these products, but they have to be used carefully.
Click to expand...

I use it for a lot of years for Cynops and Bombina, and haven't got any problems with it.

I use Can-tax from Oropharma (was called Orlux before), and is indeed mentioned for birds.
 
Azhael said:
Canthaxanthin is a naturally ocurring carotene that appears in many crustaceans (and many other organisms). Gammarids, Daphnia, copepods, artemia, etc, all contain carotenes such as canthaxanthin or astaxanthin which the newt´s methabolism uses to store in the xanthophores.

Apart from the natural sources of these carotenes, there are also comercial products such as NektonRep-Color which have high concentrations of them and can be administered with the food. You can have amazing and very fast results with these products, but they have to be used carefully.
Click to expand...

So would feeding them frozen Hikari brand brine shrimp do the trick at all? Or do I need to get some live daphnia/artemia?

Also, we've these other things like NektonRep, how exactly is it administered with food? Are certain foods better than others for using?
 
Frozen artemia has a lower content of carotenes because of the freezing process. I´ve found that artemia is not that good in building up the red color....Daphnia is supossed to be better, and i know gammarids give excelent results.

The products like NektonRep-Color are powdered like any other typical vitamin suplement. You can administer it by dusting the food items. Obviously this only works for terrestrial animals, since the powder coating doesn´t resist the water well. However, i´ve had a decent result by injecting a solution of the powder into earthworms (then feeding them to aquatic caudates). Adding it to the diet of the feeding animals also works rather well.
 
Azhael said:
Obviously this only works for terrestrial animals, since the powder coating doesn´t resist the water well.
Click to expand...

I use it also on tubifex worms. Before rinse with water for a period, I add a lot of powder on the tubifex. A lot will solve in the water and flush away, but there are a lot of lumps which stay between the little worms. This will be eaten too, when grabbing the tubifex.
 
I´ve tried that with frozen bloodworms and had an almost decent result. A friend an i are working on finding the perfect recipe so that it´s most effective.
 
I have had success in dosing and gut loading fruit fly larvae and crickets. I too have used it with various worms and have even dosed snails with it in the past. While still perfecting the recipe, I have even managed to raise orange-colored house crickets with my "home brew". Sadly, my Cynops will soon all be aquatic again, so it is back to loading their tanks with gammarus and dosed D. magna.

Nothing seems to beat Gammarus sp. and other similar crustaceans though.
 
Do fish shops or anywhere like that sell gammarids? I've seen then in the wild here, but all the ones I've seen were pretty damn big, like an inch or two, big green suckers. I'm not sure if my newts could eat those (unless I chopped them up)
 
There are shops that sell Gammarus indeed. You just have to find where.
 
I'm wondering whether the colour issue is purely aesthetic or are there any health implications, too?
 
No, it has nothing to do with their health. They just miss some carotenes in their food.
 
There aren´t any known negative effects.
The only problem is that sometimes the very pale colour of some animals is an indication of a very poor and insufficient diet, which might lead into several problems, in which case it´s not the lack of carotenes but the lack of a healthy diet that is the problem.
I argued with a friend about this, and we discussed that since carotenes are precursors of vitamin A, there should be problems associated with a very pale, red-less coloration. As it turns out, this animals are perfectly healthy.
My personal theory is that the amount of carotenes they need to ingest in order to be able to store enough to develop a nice red coloration, is way bigger than the amount they need to maintain their health.
 
Has anyone tried freeze tried Cyclop-Eeze before? I went to a fish store looking for Daphnia, explained my problem. They said that the free-dried zooplankton was pretty high concentrations of carotenes.
 
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