H.orientalis eggs.

Niels D

Niels D

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A little village called Terheijden
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04-01-2012
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07-01-2012
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14-01-2012
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Those are some pretty amazing images, thank you for sharing!
 
Too bad for all the snail poop in the last picture, but I allready had the little containers up and running and I allways put some snails in it for cleaning. I was too lazy to put the larvae in another tank to make a pic... :eek:

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Brilliant picture!
You even managed to catch the balancers, plus the gills look wicked :D
 
The picture is a bit dark though. I put het larvae in a white ceramic soup bowl and made the picture using a flash, but it was still too dark though. Jeroen Spobeck taught me this method, but he does the trick better than me.

Still it's nice too see such a small creature from up close. With the naked eye you can't see the nice looking structure of the gills. I have one question though, do these balancers become the front legs?
 
No, the balancers will be reabsorbed and front legs will sprout behind the gills.
 
Few people do unless they read about them, because they are short lived and tiny. It´s rare to see them clearly on pictures. As Kaysie said, they are independent structures from the front limbs and are usually reabsorved right after the front limb buds become visible
 
If you're using a DLSR camera you can open up the aperture or up the ISO to get a few more stops of light out of it. Its a really cool larvae tho.
 
Do all species have these balancers? I guess T.dobrogicus has, because they were lying on their sides in the beginning just like H.orientalis.
 
Really smashing pictures both in this thread and the dobro one, thank you for shring, really, the detail is just beautiful.

It is my understanding, although i may be wrong, that all newts have balancers in their larval stage, and that balancing structures appear in other families other than salamandridae, too. However there are species with different developmental strategies who don´t seem to have any balancers at any stage of their development, which shouldn´t be surprising since they don´t need them. Think about a S.salamandra larva, for example, it would be ridiculous to produce balancers. What i ignore is wether such cases go through an embryological stage where the structure or a precursor, forms. That would be supposing that it´s an ancestral characteristic for the entire order which i don´t know if it is. It would seem restricted to those species whose strategy involves a free living larval stage that starts out quite underdeveloped.
Sorry for the rambling xD I just wanted to make it clear that i don´t know for certain if it appears in all species although my understanding is that it doesn´t.
 
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No problem. You can rant all you want if you ask me. ;)

Balancers. Awesome! Wish I had them as a little boy. I can imagine my mother saying: "Get that balancer out of your nose! Can't you use a handkerchief!"
 
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