Just a curious observation.

[Azhael]

I was feeding my marbled newts yesterday and as usual i spent an hour watching them hehe. I´ve observed something that i find interesting with my marms lately. Since they became aquatic they´ve changed their feeding attitude. When they were terrestrial there were three that ate right away from the tweezers and were always fat and nice. Two more that ate well but not as agressively as the others. And the one left, my favourite, was a little pain in the ***... Ate only every three days and less than half the other did every day. But still he seemed to do just fine with that schedule, and grew as the others.
The "curious observation" i was talking about is that now that they are aquatic it´s just the opposite. The picky one is now a pig...by far the most agressive and hungry one. Always the first to start eating, and the only one that eats until he becomes a huge ball with legs hehe. Of the three that ate great when terrestrial, one is still a pig, but the other two eat just the necessary, it looks like they fail to see the bloodworms until they are right in front of their nose. The two left that were a little passive at feeding time are now eating more.

So my observation...more or less, is that the ones that were agressive eaters when terrestrial are now passive aquatic eaters. And the ones that were passive or picky are now noticeably more agressive.

Has anyone else noticed something similar with they´re newts??
I recall it happened something similar with my C.orientalis. When i kept them terrestrial for a bout 20 days, the male hardly ate and the female ate great, when they were aquatic again the female seemed to fail finding the food while the male was very agressive.
It just looks like the ones that eat well on land have a hard time localizing food under water.

 

[coendeurloo]

Feeding behaviour can indeed change drastically when they change from terrestrial to an aquatic lifestyle, though most species seem to eat more when aquatic. I, and I presume many others, have noticed similar changes with various triturus species. Do the T. marmoratus have the option to choose between aquatic and totally dry? How long have they been aquatic now?

 

[Azhael]

They have some floating bark to climb if they want. They have been aquatic since April if i remember well. When i move back to where i´m studying i was planning on creating a small land section with bricks and some rocks. What i find interesting about my marms is not only that the feeding behaviour had changed, but that it seemed to have inverted for each animal.