Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am getting a firebelly in about two weeks and I have a good tank setup so far... all I was wondering was about the food items and substrate. I have been to numerous sites that tell me to get large round rocks, but food products will fall through them.. and if the rocks are too small the newts may digest them! If anyone knows any inexpensive brands of a good type of natural looking substrate I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know! The other thing was about the food, I have been to sites that tell me the best food sources were earthworms, tubifex worms, bloodworms, and brine shrimp. Brine shrimp are salty so they are not good. Does anyone know which is best out of the other three? I was going to use tubifex cubes and bloodworms, is that a good choice? Thank you for taking the time to read this and answer!

Large round rock substrate is a bad idea for the reason you mentioned. Fine sand or gravel too big to get swallowed is fine:
http://mike-edwardes.members.beeb.net/Amphibiary/Corientalis.html

Food:
Chopped small earthworms, Daphnia, grindalworms/whiteworms, aquatic insects/larvae, frozen bloodworms, small woodlice:
http://mike-edwardes.members.beeb.net/Amphibiary/frogfood1.html
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Mike.
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http://mike-edwardes.members.beeb.net/Amphibiary

I agree with Mike. You might want to try fine sand, although this won't work with certain kinds of filters. Also, I've heard that pool filter sand works better than "play sand". Personally, I just use nothing on the tank bottom for half the tank, and on the other side, I use large pebbles. I feed them on the bare side. It's easy to siphon around large pebbles. Chopped earthworms and frozen bloodworms are the best foods, in my opinion. I recommend the FAQs and articles at:
www.caudata.org/caudatecentral/

I have just regular fish tank gravel in my tank (not the big stones, but the medium-sized ones), and my newts seem to be find with it. As for food, I unfortunately don't have any live food for them, but I have the next best thing, freeze-dried! They've got like, a billion types of food (I work in a pet store, so I get discounts on it all ), including freeze-dried bloodworms, brine shrimp cubes (which I have to break up a little bit so they can eat it whole), baked crickets (it sounds weird, and it is... but it's apparantly coated in vitamin goodness...), shrimp pellets (which they don't seem to like very much, as they're pretty big), and sinking newt pellets.
Newts seem to like variety in their diet, and hey, mine have definitely got variety