First newt...

[jenny]

ok ive decided im going to get either 2 paddle tailed newts or 2 fire belly newts.

the guy at the pet shop said paddle tailed newts are prob better than fire belly (but then he only has paddle tailed and not fire bellied so...)

but which do you all think would be best?

he said id need for paddle tailed an 18 inch tank for a pair. and info ive found on the net says they are mainly aquatic but need something they can rest on just incase and that the water isnt deep enough that they can come up and gulp for air.

if somewhere says say a 10 gal tank. how many inches roughly is this?

 

[chris]

Pachytritin will require a MUCH bigger tank than that - they are highly aggressive. If you get Pachytriton labiatus, I would by a single animal to avoid fights and the related issues.
Keep them in cool, moving water with lots of rocks providing caves. The basic idea is to simulate a small river. Arrange the rocks so that although the filter is producing a current, there are many caves with no or little water flow. If youy get a male-female pair (although aggression can still happen) you would probably get away with a 3foot. Adult males have white-blue dots on the tail.
Pachytriton are hardier than cynops in my experience, so you are more likely to find healthy paddletails in a petshop than cynops. If you can get healthy animals, I would say that it would be better to get a group of firebellies.
You are right to distrust the advice from the petshop.
Chris

 

[jenny]

im thinkin maybe a firebelly then.

but then now ive found out about a neotenic tiger salamander and id quite like one of those.

but it is one that is take from the wild so id prefere to have a captive bred one.

do fire bellied newts tend to be captive bred or taken from the wild? and do pet shops tend to lie about them being captive bred or wild taken?

 

[benjamin]

If you want, I could send you between 10 and 15 CB chinese firebelly eggs by mail, for a small fee. Send me a private message if your interested. They take up a lot less space then paddle tails and are virtually non-agressive. If you raise them well, they should be more healthy than most petshop animals.

 

[pollywog]

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>jenny gibbes wrote on Friday, 07 January, 2005 - 17:01 :</font>

"do fire bellied newts tend to be captive bred or taken from the wild? and do pet shops tend to lie about them being captive bred or wild taken?"<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>
Jenny,
Most Fire-bellied Newts available from petshops and aquarists are wild caught. It is not that pet shops lie about the origin of the animals just that quite often the pet shops do not know the origin of the animals and assume they are from commercial breeders, this is especially true with aquarists as the majority of anurans available to them are from commercial breeders and so they assume the caudates come in the same way.