Will my Cynops Orientalis larvae eat frozen bloodworms ? /my answer

[pierre-gilles]

My C.O. larvae are now 6 weeks old. Since they hatched, I feed them with freshly hatched brine shrimp, made like the common recipe we find in Jennifer Macke's excellent article "Microfoods for Caudate Larvae".

Tonight, I made a new "experiment". I tried to feed my newts with frozen bloodworms. I used a knife to cut the bigger ones and I manipulated them with tweezers.

Material I used

Now for the reaction... It was fast, this is the least I can say. Larvae seemed even more attracted to those bloodworms than to live brine shrimp. It was beautiful to see those guys chasing bloodworms half as big as them.

This was their first contact with bloodworms

I even filmed the whole thing! I made this small movie where you can see how one of my larvae who never ever saw anything else than live brine shrimp reacts when I drop a frozen bloodworm in front of her.

Right-click then save as...

http://www3.sympatico.ca/marie.1980/salamandre/bloodworms.wmv

Of course, because it worked well for me doesn't mean it will work for everyone, but I wanted to share this with you!

Hope you enjoyed

Pierre

(Message edited by xirto on July 06, 2004)

 

[joseph]

Cool movie. Nice to see how eagerly he accepted the frozen bloodworm. Is there any issue with feeding them such large pieces? I accidentally fed my C. o half a earthworm that took her maybe 1 minute to down completely. No apparent problems besides a very plump newt, but I wonder if that puts a lot of stress on them or not. The worm could be seen wriggling for several seconds.

(Message edited by fishkeeper on July 06, 2004)

 

[pierre-gilles]

The newt took about 30 second to swallow this worm in the video. The worm was big and I wouldn't feed them with larger pieces. I can't tell about the stress it put on them, but as far as I know they will let go their "prey" if it is too big for them.

I'm pretty confident that those kind of meals will "beef em up" faster than only brine shrimp,

 

[kaysie]

I've also had some accidental large-worm feedings. However, I have larger, terrestrial salamanders. But they seem to come out okay. I imagine if you dont do it often, it isnt too much stress

 

[jeffrey]

Nice filming, I hope my photographic technique improves and I can take some good pics of my C.O.s as they develop. I watched my smaller larva seemingly struggle for over a minute with a full sized bloodworm. I had tried cutting some in half previously and the small larva was disinterested but its larger siblings devoured them with relish.

 

[meghan]

Hey! I have larvae i'm raising and i've noticed if i get too big of a chunk of worm and it can't eat it, it spits it out and doesn't bother with it. I have even seen little bites out of larger chunks.

 

[pierre-gilles]

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>Meghan (2tanker) wrote on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 02:29 :</font>

"Hey! I have larvae i'm raising and i've noticed if i get too big of a chunk of worm and it can't eat it, it spits it out and doesn't bother with it. I have even seen little bites out of larger chunks."<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>

Hehe, I have observed the same thing. After some other bloodworms meals, I can now adjust the size of the worms I give to them so they can eat more easily.

Definitely, those small larvae eat like pigs! Hope they'll be all strong enough to go throught metamorphosis!