question on microfoods for fire bellied newts and larva

[vistajpdf]

My white worms arrived today and I fed them to "Newty" and his three almost two-month old buddies. I wondered if I should have chopped them as Newty seemed to have one hanging out of his mouth for awhile. I actually thought about taking tweezers and trying to pull it back out but when I returned to the room with the tweezers, he had apparently eaten it all.

Secondly, are white worms OK for the adults? I read somewhere that they aren't quite as nutritious? I will continue to supplement the adults with thawed frozen bloodworms and the larva with Daphnia and BBS.

Dana

 

[Jennewt]

Whiteworms are fine for adults too. The only nutritional downside for whiteworms is that they lack pigmentation, and newts raised on a diet of whiteworms won't develop an orange belly. You can avoid this by supplementing with other foods, as you are doing. It may help to feed the whiteworms a diet of color-promoting food (such as the fish foods that claim to make fish more colorful). Presumably some of the gut contents of the whiteworms is passed on to the newts.

I wouldn't worry about the larva's difficulty eating the worm. If it's truly too big, the larva can spit it out. And larvae can eat surprisingly large worms, and this is certainly not harmful.

 

[vistajpdf]

Great! Thank you so much!

Dana