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Newt Water Tank Help

bellacrest Feb 11, 2006 05:13 PM

Recently my two Cour'de Alene newts have been growing like crazy. They went from tiny little 1 inch things into 3 inch long monsters. They are also starting to jump into the tiny watering cup I stuck in the middle of their 5 gallon land tank, which leads me to believe that they want to swim. They are still in their 5 gallon tank at the moment, but I've purchased a 10 gallon one just recently. This one I am going to change so that it will be 80% land and 20% water. However, I've found some rather tricky problems.

- I can just stick a divider in but the newts won't be able to climb out. I could just add a ladder but thats not very eye appealing and due to the weight of the newts, the ladder rolls over.
- I want to make the 80% land into sort of an island thing, but I don't know what materials to use to build a sort of base. (Aka I don't know what sort of materials I can use that won't poison my newts)

So any help on this would be really appreciated. And sorry for my bad English.

Replies (1)

jennewt Feb 15, 2006 08:33 PM

Are you sure about the name of the species? There are Coeur d'Alene salamanders (Plethodon idahoensis), but they are uncommon, they are not newts, and I don't think they would look like "monsters". Plethodons are long and thin.

Here are some tank design ideas:
http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/setups.shtml

>>Recently my two Cour'de Alene newts have been growing like crazy. They went from tiny little 1 inch things into 3 inch long monsters. They are also starting to jump into the tiny watering cup I stuck in the middle of their 5 gallon land tank, which leads me to believe that they want to swim. They are still in their 5 gallon tank at the moment, but I've purchased a 10 gallon one just recently. This one I am going to change so that it will be 80% land and 20% water. However, I've found some rather tricky problems.
>>
>>- I can just stick a divider in but the newts won't be able to climb out. I could just add a ladder but thats not very eye appealing and due to the weight of the newts, the ladder rolls over.
>>- I want to make the 80% land into sort of an island thing, but I don't know what materials to use to build a sort of base. (Aka I don't know what sort of materials I can use that won't poison my newts)
>>
>>So any help on this would be really appreciated. And sorry for my bad English.

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