I've recently found out that all four of my newts have names now. You know how names just come naturally after a while, without you actively thinking about it? That's what happened.
Because fire bellied newts are best recognised by the patterns on their bellies, here's a 'belly' picture of each of them, proudly showing their true colours.


First here's Leah, as pictured by aka_phoenix. Leah has been with me for over ten years. She's called Leah because she's been with a guy named Leo for years. It just seemed fitting to give them matching names. But he died about two years ago and Leah has been lonely ever since. Until the day when I found three FBNs (fire-bellied newts) in a local shop!
In this picture, she's busy laying an egg. That's how happy she was when she finally got some tankmates, including... Bertus.




There he is now: Bertus, the Big Daddy.
I presumed him to be a female, but I did find him rather large and burly, so I named her Big Bertha. But Bertha turned out to be Bertus, and now has a distinctly higher tail than the females do. Bertus is the biggest and fiercest looking FBN I've seen so far.




Up next, we have Sammy. She got her name because she likes to climb, which makes it really easy to take a belly picture of her. There's a Dutch song which goes 'Up, Sammy, look up, Sammy...' and she's always moving upwards, and eventually there's usually a tiny splash. Sammy has a quite distinctive belly pattern which makes her easy to recognise. She spends a lot of time hanging out with Robinson.




And finally, here's Robinson. She is aptly named because when she arived in the tank she would only stay on the land area and hardly ever entered the water (I've since read that this is common for newts that have been moved to a different tank). All three of the 'new' guys did that, but it took her the longest to start swimming again, so she has been living on an island for a long time. Now, however, she enjoys swimming, and she likes to climb almost as much as Sammy does.