...my first eggs, now what?

[ken123]

Hi all,
so I got two FB Cops orientalis and it looks like one is trying and / or is laying eggs! Well I’m super excited. But I now need to know what to do next…sorry I did not search a zillion threads…do I move them? Do I change the water more? Just let it roll? Whoa, Any thought and instructions would be super appreciated.
The setup is a 10 gallon about half full, gravel and a mix of planted substrate, live plants, wood and rock caves, filtered.
Thanks a bunch!! :wacko:

 

[asfouts]

Lucky you! I had a couple for 10 years and never got a succesful breed. So what most people do when they get eggs is they move them very carefully, because parents have been known to eat them (this is a general thing I dont know cynops orientalis do or not). The tank you keep them in should have no flow and a sponge filter is quite widely used in nurseries. Keep the branch or whatever they are attached to trying to extract the eggs from where they are attached is more destructive then helpful. Do very small water changes at this time, or not at all (the best thing to do is not fill the nursery tank all the way so you can add clean water.) wait for the little guys to hatch and while you do so check what they eat, most tadpoles eat algae. There are blanks in the egg mass, that is eggs that did not get fertilized, those are fodder for the succesful tadpoles. Watch them go! Also a thing to know is that once they hatch they arent very good swimmers, wait a few days. At first it looks like they are all dead in the peculiar ways they sit in the water. Anyway its always fun to watch em grow. Hope this helps

 

[evut]

Hope you find some fertile eggs soon!
Have a look at the Reproduction and Rearing section here. The articles should answer most of your questions.

Asfouts, newt larvae don't eat algae but living moving animals (are you thinking of frog tadpoles?), for example baby brine shrimp, microworms or even ostracods etc. As they grow, they can eat bigger things like bloodworms, chopped blackworms or even small earthworms. I agree with what you are saying about removing the eggs, but you should get rid of the infertile ones as soon as they start getting cloudy and mouldy - otherwise they could spoil your good eggs.

 

[Azhael]

A lot of confussion there, Asfouts. Hypselotriton orientalis doesn´t lay egg masses, it lays eggs individually, wrapped in leaves. Unfertilized eggs will not be eaten by larvae, and as Eva said, they are a problem because they can spread fungus to healthy eggs. And of course, the larvae are strict carnivores.

It seems from the pictures that you have two females, so i´m guessing they are recent acquisitions and one (or both) of the females was already gravid when collected from the wild. This is fairly common as adults are captured when they are aquatic.
There are a couple of suggestions i would make about the tank. The first one is that gravel is only going to cause trouble. It can be accidentally ingested causing all sorts of trouble. It also traps enormous amounts of debris and difficultates feeding and cleaning.
Also, you´d do well in taking advantage of the full volume of the tank. 10gallons is the minimum recommended volume of water for one or two small newts. A smaller volume will provide terrible thermal stability, insufficient buffering of organic compounds, pH, etc...
The filter would be redundant if you have a sufficient volume of water and a large amount of live plants. You could get rid of it, eliminating both a source of heat and the current, which these newts hate.

This is possibly the commonest species in the hobby so if Eva´s links are insufficient (which is not likely), there is a huuuuuge wealth of information around the forums on how to care for the adults, and how to raise the larvae.

 

[ken123]

Fantastic information and yea I did find the info pages about care and raising.

Funny thing the ‘new newt’ is not the one doing the laying. I had thought that they were the same sex too. Do they go though a false pregnancy or lay unfertile eggs?

The filter is enclosed behind some rock that subdues the current, all my planted fish tanks the water circulation seems to help the plants, I’ll look at removing it. The two Onion snails seem to do an ok job cleaning up and with weekly to bi-weekly water change – I probable don’t need the filter…and I have that 29g just sitting there maybe it calling is super newt set-up!

Thanks a bunch for all the information everyone.