What other herps/fish have you kept?

[Molch]

i' m curious...are newt people strictly newt people, or how many of us have also kept other herp or fish species? Please take the poll to satisfy my curiosity

Also, if you want, tell us how you got into the newt habit - for example, did you start with fresh water aquariums and discover newts from there?

to start w. myself - I was in love with newts before I finished kindergarten (there was a pond across the street from kindergarten, and once I caused some local panic when I slipped away unnoticed only to be discovered happily catching newts at the pond hours later - that was ca. 1972 and I was about 5 :wacko

I have dabbled with freshwater aquariums, where my greatest interest were the plants rather than the fish actually. I've also kept a few frogs and green Anolis over the years.

 

[Cas]

I was always the kid with random animals, I had mud crabs as pets for a while, sometimes spiders i'd place in container and catch flies for but mum would eventually find and kill them. Also have a bluey.

Since its next to impossible to keep anything which is non-native (or already introduced) in Aus. I have no experience with newts, but once saw how axolotl's eat at uni, and instantly wanted one. I started out with goldfish first to make sure I wouldn't kill it. 4 years later after trying other freshwater fish, I finally got that axie I wanted. So I guess you could say it was Axies that got me started on freshwater fish?

 

[Greatwtehunter]

My house is, and will always be, a zoo! I have frogs, snakes, turtles, salamanders, lizards, fish, geckos, newts, toads, and even a couple of kids.

 

[Azhael]

I´m like Justin...i´ve always had a small zoo xD
When i was a kid i had no concept of legality or ecology, etc, so i tended to take anything home...really, anything...i´ve even pleaded to my mum with a viper in my hand to pleeeeeeeeease let me keep it xD
There was no discrimination when i was a kid...if it was alive and fitted inside a tank....it got picked up. Of course i eventually realized how wrong that was...and inmediately stopped doing so.

 

[joeysgreen]

My zoo is predominately of the herp kind, but I do have the odd invertebrate or fish, but they are predominately feeder colonies.
My first pets were curly tailed lizards when I was 9 years old. Soon after I tried some japanese firebelly newts. The petstore guy sold me a 50gram tin of food and said it would probably last longer than the newts. I soon was buying the newt food by the kilogram, and those newts lived to be over 20 years old. They actually bred for several years, but I was to young and dumb to know what to do with the eggs and tadpoles. No internet back then, and no role models around to tell me to buy a darn book.

Ian

 

[michael]

I've had everything on the list. When I was a child our family had : a pony, a skunk, a raccoon, a caimen, a budgy, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, caterpillars, crayfish.... But we never had a ferret.

When the neighbors house caught fire I kept there: beta, quail, ball python, cat, and cockatiel for them. I only had their ferrets for a short time.

 

[dragonlady]

As a child, I always wanted a lizard of some sort but my mom wouldn't let me get any more exotic than a guinea pig and/or hermit crabs. I have always had freshwater fish as far back as I can remember. Dogs and cats were always running around. I'd catch the occasional frog only to have Mom release it when I wasn't around...I didn't get into herps until about 15 years ago with a uromastyx. Since then, I have had beardies, chameleons, turtles/tortoises/terrapins, frogs, kids, saltwater for awhile...all that until I came across this scruffy fella at a reptile show hocking these little creatures called axolotls... I later discovered this site and now 11 axolotls, 2 andersoni, and 6 t. verrs later; my wish list is ever growing and my house ever shrinking!

 

[Opacum]

Sigh... I can't believe how many animals I kept... when my wife met me I had 8 tanks going in my room. I knew she was the 'one' when she would sit and watch TV with my Blue Tongue Skink on her...LOL. Turtles were always my animal of choice. I had 60 at one time... I was fortunate to have a well paying job, no major bills, and connections with zoos and the pet trade so I pretty much had a passport to anything legal or illegal in those days. Amazing what motivation money provides. Being the dumb kid I was, I could look in a book, make a call, and it would appear. I had scads of birds in addition to reps and amphibians as well... even a hedgehog and armadillo. Now I just have a dog and am just starting to get the 'cold-blooded itch' again. I can see this site is going to be a good (bad...LOL) influence on me...

 

[aramcheck]

My story is very similar to Azhael, down to pleading to mom with a poisonous snake in hand (a Montpellier snake) . As a kid, I use to keep everything in tanks in my bedroom, most animals were there for a couple of weeks, and then released under duress from my folks, some other were rescue animals and stayed longer and I had a couple of long term captives.

I mostly kept the local herpetofauna, from a European Pond Terrapin with a nasty dog bite to groups of the local Marms and Midwife toads. I also used to keep may local insect, many a caterpillar became pupae in my bedroom and started the imago life in my room's curtain, including a superbe Giant Peacock Moth!!! Me and my dad used to capture female Stag beetles and put them in a matchbox on the outdoor dinner table and see how many males will be landing on it during dinner!

Other noticeable captives were a very bity Western Whip snake, that I kept less than a week but drew blood a considerable amount of time, 12 years old boys do not learn fast!!! A red-eared slider that grew to a respectable size and who stank my bedroom no end (I was not to hot on the water change ), a very tame grass snake and many adorable juvenile hedgehog people would find wondering on the roads and bring to me.

 

[Azhael]

Lol, aramcheck, change the N.natrix for a N.maura and the peacock moth for an atlas moth, and we basically had the same childhood xDDD

 

[Molch]

talking of Atlas moths, while I kept and bred herps, my brother was a butterfly man. He had a butterfly aviary that took up half the floor space in his room and he'd get eggs from breeders which he would hatch out. He bred tropical Atlas moths that had a wingspan of nearly a foot and they'd flop around our house like animated flying dishrags. He'd feed the caterpillars with the neighbor's hedge clippings, which he harvested secretly at night under the cover of darkness.

My Mom was a biology teacher is a small village school and anything her students (who were the local farm brats) brought in she'd bring to us to "raise": tadpoles, salamanders, an injured squirrel, hedgehogs, water beetles, stag beetles etc.

 

[freya]

hi^^
im new here but i just wanna tell what kind of animals i currently have and maybe had back in the days!
i grew up with a lot of animals! especially dogs and cats! had some hamsters and my dad had his own bird cage that was as long as the living room! we also had a aquarium of 2 meters long with all kind of fish in it! freshwater fish. from otos to shrimps and to be honoust i dont know all those names and i was to little to remember it even (not rlly a fish person)
at the moment weve got 5 cats,2 Hymenochirus boettgeri (the little frogs),3 otos that are in the same tank as the frogs and in another fishtank of my husband he has some endler gups,fire shrimps,rasboras and our own harry the big shrimp! (Ataya gabonensis)
my own tank is filled up with 2 axolotl's! leucistic called freya of 11 cm and a wildtype called hella of 10 cm and i just have them for a few weeks now^^
totally happy!!

regards sandra

 

[bunny27]

I did have a turtle before, but that was when we were young, so I guess that doesn't count. I've had about 8 bettas in my lifetime. I currently have one right now, whom I love and spoil! He lives in a 10 gallon mansion. .

 

[freves]

I've also had everything on the list. In addition to everything else that I have at the moment we have a baby opossum that has taken up residence in my shed. We feed it cat food every night.
Chip

 

[fishkeeper]

Haha this is excellent. I see a few trends here.

Blue tongue skinks seem to be the terrestrial, handleable version of a caudate. I got one myself recently-and could see myself getting into them/geckos more. I keep snakes, have kept a few turtles(a yearling stinkpot watches me as I type this), tarantulas(low maintenance similar to most caudates), FW fish, planted tanks, etc.

Raised silkmoths(polyphemus) and good ol Bombyx mori also as well as butterflies. They spent much of their time flapping about on the windowsill in fruitless pursuit of the outside world-worrying my parents that their "dust" was poisonous and in the case of the silkmoths laying eggs all over everything...LOL

All the manner of random animals found there way home with me when I was a kid. Some of my earliest memories is a jar of unfortunate dragonflies that would awaken me in the morning as they started to buzz about(they got released soon after for the most part since they obviously didn't enjoy the experience!). The first aquarium we got was stocked with bullfrog tadpoles, a small crayfish, and a few goldfish. All these creatures grew and eventually got transferred to black trashcans in the backyard-and eventually to a pond. Boy did it teach me patience waiting for the first #^#^@! bullfrog tadpole to transform!

I think their are few salamander/newt specialists in truth. They are just so universally appealing and paths to keeping them can be had by so many different ways(I must say, the skills I learned keeping FW fish were by far the most applicable to keeping/breeding/raising newts).

 

[jclee]

I've had everything on the list (and then some) except for saltwater fish and inverts. Right now, I've got mammals, birds, amphibians (both caudates and anurans), reptiles, fish, and invertebrates, if you count red cherry shrimp. (This just reminded me to update the "species kepts" section under "about me." It's so hard to keep up.) Just like most of you, I started young, and I've had a lot of different species in my day.

 

[DeCypher]

I can't think of an animal that hasn't been in my house at one time

Scorpions, Tarantulas, veiled chameleons, ball pythons, turtles, dogs and cats, newts (obviously), rats, crabs, saltwater fish, and a euromastyx...

You don't think I've had too many, do you?

 

[The Banana]

Dogs, we had budgies and quails, used to have rabbits but I was allergic (not anymore), lots of hermit crabs, chickens, fish.. I'm into fish.. really into! Bettas specially. I mean look at this pair I have, mum & dad got them for me for my birthday - Pink Carnation HM pair. Tropical fish, we once had a blue yabbie, but it ate all the fish and destroyed the tank so we took it back.

 

[Kaysie]

Gosh... I've had turtles (stinkpots, raised from eggs), a variety of frogs and salamanders (some of the coolest: Dicamptodon ensatus and Ambystoma macrodactylum), a variety of snakes (mostly boids, including an 8 inch Kenyan sand boa named Killer, but I've kept a lot of colubrids as well), a couple of chameleons, geckos. Had a huge fish tank when I was younger with mostly small 'sharks', enormous silver dollars, and a 14" plecostemus.

 

[DeCypher]

Seems like most of us Caudata people have had animals that most people have never seen in a zoo or even heard of. I didn't know what an Axolotl was until about 4 months ago, which ironically was the same time I joined!