Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've got yet another breeding question for everyone...

I have two firebelly newts (I'm pretty sure that they're Chinese firebellies, but I could be wrong... they're definitely the same species though), one male and one female. For the last 2 or 3 weeks they've been sortof hanging around this one little corner in their tank where their favourite plant is. A couple weeks ago when I was cleaning the tank, I found a little dead baby "thing" in there! And I say "thing" because it didn't look anything whatsoever like a newt in any way, shape or form. It was kinda pink and flesh coloured, you could see the spine, eyes and mouth, the two front legs and a bit of tail. I never found any evidence at all of an egg, or saw anything in the plants or anywhere else in the tank for that matter that would suggest that they'd begun breeding. If they do breed, that's cool, I'd be glad to have the little newts and take care of them(I have a separate tank that I used as a quarantine tank before for my first newt Batman before he died, which I would use again as a "nursery".
I guess my question is... is that dead thing that I found REALLY a newt larva, or some kind of crazy dead insect child, or something else? I wish I'd taken a picture of it... (damn), but I drew one; see the links.
Link

The link doesn't work for me. But here is a page with pictures of newt eggs and larvae. It would be easy enough to miss seeing the egg(s). The newts hide them well in plants.

http://www.caudata.org/caudatecentral/articles/MACKE1.html
http://www.caudata.org/caudatecentral/articles/MACKE1.html

The link works if you hit reload.

Basically the server is trying to avoid being an image server (bandwidth is expensive) and will give you that error page if the referring page is from a different domain. But hitting reload, it doesn't know the refering page and lets you see it.

Anyway - the picture does look like salamandar larvae.
It could be the dead one just died, or it could be that it starved - if there isn't food small enough for it.

I'm guessing that infantcide happened and that the parents ate the young - unless the larvae have a really good place to hide, that will happen.

Thanks The link helps a lot too, so thanks to... uh... whoever posted it (i forget the name, sorry - very short term memory). I've been checking about once a week for two weeks for any more eggs/signs of little kids in the tank, but alas I have found nothing so far. Ah well, maybe later