Sad night

Thursday night I came home from work. I went to check on the newts to see what they were up to. It’s always fun to try and find them as they blend in so well in their tank. Their eyes tend to give them away though. I found Cleopatra and Isaac up on the moss hill and saw Lefty in the water. He was positioned weird so I reached in to check him out and found him dead.

I put Lefty aside and took Cleo and Isaac out in a dish while I cleaned out the tank. I did not know if Lefty died from the missing limb or from a skin infection. I wasn’t sure if that meant the tank was then unsafe for the other two. I studied them and they did not have any sores.

Tasha got home and I told her about Lefty. We got in the car and took him to the petstore to have them take a look. Herman was the guy at the store that talked to us. We told him about the missing limb, then the sore, and had him take a look. He said it looked like fungus or some sort of other wound. The store had medicine which we went to take a look at. They had some frog ointment that aided healing but did not have anything specific for newts.

He suggested some supplements to strengthen the other two by raising their immunities in case Lefty did have some sort of infection. He also pointed us to some water conditioner that removes impurities out of tap water and also contained ingredients to help the newts retain their electrolyte levels.

He didn’t know much about amphibians but he did raise geckos. He had 6 leopard geckos that he raised and bred. Like a proud papa he showed us still shots and video clips of them he had stored on his cell phone. It was very nice of him to take them time to talk to us about his geckos and about terrariums and such. I think he could tell we were upset about Lefty.

We went back up front to get another newt. Tasha pointed one out she liked and I reached in to get it. I flipped it over and said, “We’ve got a boy.” Herman did not know how to tell the difference so we have him a little lesson. Tasha noticed a sore on this one’s side, above his leg. It looked like the one Lefty had. We showed it to Herman and put it back. I picked up another one and found a sore on its tail. We did this a few times. We actually found a female with a swollen lower region and I asked if it was pregnant, but I don’t know how old they must be before they are able to reproduce and these were juveniles. It walked across my hand and I noticed a blood trail. We took a better look and saw that it wasn’t pregnant but infected. Herman commented that he’s wanted to separate the firebelly frogs and newts before but the store hadn’t. Maybe the frogs were being aggressive? Then we noticed the heating lamp that had been on top of the tank and wondered if it had overheated the rocks and the sores were actually burns. Herman is going to look into it. Maybe we inadvertently found an issue and the store can fix it.

Herman asked if newts could be housed in multiple males. I guess that his geckos cannot because they are territorial. So his male gecko has a 5 gecko harem. We didn’t know but to play it safe we chose a sore-less female to take home.