Help with Identification.

[james11]

I recently got a sack of eggs at a local pond and thought I would raise them. The eggs were basicaly a large green globular mass with anywhere from about 50-75 individual eggs. I keept them in a bucket of pond water and soon they started to hatch, I now have about 15 larvae and my friend has another 10(most never hatched). The larvae are now in a plastic container that is about 1 ' x 1' and has about 3-4 inches of water. I have a nice layer(1/2 cm) thick of pond silt at the bottom along with various other things for them to hide in like twigs/leaves/moss and a very large rock with a nice low gradient slant for them to climb up on when they go through their metamorphosis. Today I'm going out to purchase a large 40 gallon tank for when they get bigger, my plan is to release most and keep the biggest/healthiest few.

Since I have no aeration for the water i have been changing about 1/4 of it everyday with fresh pond water, is this okay? What type of aeration/filtration should I set up in my new tank?

Right now I'm not feeding them much, i know that there is some tiny living microbes in the water as I can occasionally see them swiming around. Every few days I have also been adding some crushed up algae pellet food(very,very little as to not foul the water). Do you think this diet is adequate?

The big question is what type of salamander do you think they could possible be? I live in Vancouver, B.C, in the lowermainland, so this is pretty much your classic coastal temperate rainforest... If someone could provide a list of potential species and pictures so that once they get bigger I could identify them it would be great. The only thing that I can think of to describe them is that their gills have 3 "frills" (I think) and the head seems somewhat transparent compared to the body, some of them now also have red dotes on their sides. They hatched around the 20-22 of April and they now all have noticable front legs with 2 toes. They look much like this- http://www.narbeck.org/Bugs/Bug Portraits_07.htm except not spotted/freckled like that one.

Any help is appreciated, if there is anything I need to know or if I'm doing something wrong please let me know, thanks.

P.S this is a great site, by far the most comprehensive and informative of the net.

 

[Jennewt]

The eggs being a "green globular mass" pretty much clinches the ID. Not many sals lay an egg mass, but spotted sals do, and it's almost always green. See:
http://www.caudata.org/cc/species/Ambystoma/A_maculatum.shtml
They will soon need larger food than the micro-organisms they are getting from the pond water. Sal larvae are strictly carnivorous, so the only benefit they get from algae pellets is that the pellets feed the micro-organisms. (And the danger is that the decaying pellets may foul the water, so I would say don't use them at all.) I would recommend trying to find a local source of live blackworms. Or you can get a brine shrimp net and strain out daphnia and other micros from the pond they came from. See also:
http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/raising.shtml

 

[james11]

Thanks, are you sure it is a spotted sal because on everything i read about them says they are found in the eastern parts of the U.S and Canada and I'm on the west coast??

http://www.uga.edu/srelherp/salamanders/ambmac.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_Salamander

 

[james11]

just another quick question- I got a 20 gal tank now and it is filled up about half way,I bought a 20 gallon pump and a simple airstone, is it okay for me to turn it off at night? The tank is in my room and even though it is pretty quiet I still don't like listening to the humming at night. If I turn it off will the flucuation in O2 levels be stressfull to the sals?

 

[John]

With these things you either have the pump on permanently (with the exception of cleaning time or perhaps feeding time) or off permanently (i.e. you don't use a pump at all). Half on and half off is worse than always off. And it's not so much that Oxygen levels will fluctuate but more that the rate of gaseous exchange/turnover will be changed dramatically each time you turn the pump on or off and as you correctly guess this will stress the salamanders (very much).

 

[Abrahm]

Based on your location and a quick flip through Salamanders of the United States and Canada I would wager your larvae and eggs are Ambystoma gracile. These animals are often found with symbiotic algae late in their egg development which would give them that green color. I didn't check every animal that it could be so of course I may be wrong :happy:

Also this website has a list of all the amphibians found in B.C. You can use that list to search either Caudata Culture or you can check out the book I mentioned above from the local library. It is by James Petranka and is the bible for North American (north of Mexico) caudates.

 

[tupinambis]

Right here in the Fraser Valley lowlands there are two possibilities of what you collected, either Ambystoma gracile or A.macrodactylum. Both can accumulate a bit of algae in their mass to take on a greenish look, however there are other differences. If they just started hatching in the last week or two, then they are most likely A.gracile; if they started hatching over about a month ago, then they would likely be A.macrodactylum. Further, A.gracile egg masses are usually quite large, about the size of a good grapefruit, the eggs are quite well spaced (5-10mm apart within the gelatin), and the outside of the mass typically has frilly or wispy jelly extensions that make the mass look quite fuzzy; A.macrodactylum egg masses are smaller, about the size of a decent plum, the eggs are much more densely packed in the mass, frequently touching, and the outside is smooth. There are differences in the gills of each, although I imagine that at the moment the larvae are way too small to detect these differences. Hope this helps.

 

[james11]

Right here in the Fraser Valley lowlands there are two possibilities of what you collected, either Ambystoma gracile or A.macrodactylum. Both can accumulate a bit of algae in their mass to take on a greenish look, however there are other differences. If they just started hatching in the last week or two, then they are most likely A.gracile; if they started hatching over about a month ago, then they would likely be A.macrodactylum. Further, A.gracile egg masses are usually quite large, about the size of a good grapefruit, the eggs are quite well spaced (5-10mm apart within the gelatin), and the outside of the mass typically has frilly or wispy jelly extensions that make the mass look quite fuzzy; A.macrodactylum egg masses are smaller, about the size of a decent plum, the eggs are much more densely packed in the mass, frequently touching, and the outside is smooth. There are differences in the gills of each, although I imagine that at the moment the larvae are way too small to detect these differences. Hope this helps.

Thanks alot.

 

[tupinambis]

No problem. And whereas I'd agree that Petranka's Salamanders of the United States and Canada is an excellent reference, for identifying local eggs and larvae you'd probably find Amphibians of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia by Charlotte C. Corkran and Chris Thoms much more helpful (it is very well documented with pictures of most life stages, a surprisingly excellent little book).