Keeping the tank cool enough

[stephanie]

Hi,
After a rough start in the tank, my two fairly new baby newts are eating, seemingly healthy (although not very nice to each other), and generally just hanging out with me in my office.

It's summertime, and keeping the apartment cool enough gets hard in the afternoon...the temperature creeps up each day to about 78, at which point I add ice cubes or a frozen water bottle to cool it back down.

My question is, is there any other method for cooling the tank, and how long can they take temperatures at around 78 if I went out of town for a few days?

 

[TJ]

Welcome to the site, Stephanie.

Sorry, but even if you do have a FBN or Cynops (doesn't everybody?), this is not the appropriate place to post a thread about how to keep your tanks cool because we want to keep it focused on various aspects of the newts themselves (breeding, taxonomy, life history, morphology, etc.). So I'll be moving it to the general discussion section soon. There have been a lot of threads about the subject you brought up though, so you might want to use the search function of the forum (try searching the word "cooling") to find them. In the meantime, have a look at this article of Ed's at our sister-site Caudata Culture:

Temperatures for Newly Imported Newts
http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/tempEDK.shtml

Well, you'd better work fast as I would imagine you can't always be around to add ice to the tank, and all it takes is one episode of a major rise in temperature that could kill them (as could persistent exposure to high temperatures as high as 78 F). Too bad you don't have a basement. I don't either, but I keep most of my tanks in an air-conditioned room 24/7. For the one tank one that's not, it's very large to begin with, the water is circulated and a fan blows air across the water surface (this helps!). Cooling devices can be purchased (they're around $300 here in Japan), but do keep in mind that they themselves emit heat and can raise the room temperature somewhat, inconveniencing you and whatever else you happen to keep in your room.

Here's the caresheet for Cynops orientalis, the species of newt that I assume you have

http://www.caudata.org/cc/species/Cynops/C_orientalis.shtml

 

[TJ]

<font color="ff0000">This thread has been moved here from the Fire Belly Newts discussion section</font>