| Hi! You've found me. This is kind of an experimental / placeholder journal, since the way LiveJournal has been changing recently worries me. You can find me there under the username m03m. That's m-zero-three-m. Since I'm (for now) primarily an LJ user, these entries have been copied from there. Some have even been copied from MySpace first! That causes some problems with linkage. And if there's something about site changes and other ongoing events that makes you go 'huh?' because it doesn't seem to make any sense, it's probably about LiveJournal, not Scribbld. I apologize for any confusion and other kinds of inconvenience. Oh, and copying the entries from elsewhere means losing all comments, as well.
| I've bought a couple of blue rams for my one-metre community tank. The camera sees them as bluer than the human eye does, but I can assure you they're gorgeous in real life, too. Just not as blue. Click makes bigger |
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| A good find from the pet shop (and a nice newtlet pic). Right here. |
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| Right here. Warning: cuteness alert. |
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| Two videos I just made! Check them out.Cre8tive icon, because I actually edited the videos. A bit. I'm sorry about my read sweatshirt reflecting in the glass, though. |
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| Two videos I just made! Check them out.Cre8ive icon, because I actually edited the videos. A bit. I'm sorry about my red sweatshirt reflecting in the glass, though. |
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| We lost four newtlets today. I don't know what caused it, but the container they were in didn't seem to be completely clean. It had some sort of slime or mucous that didn't wash out with hot water alone. If that's what caused it, it may have clogged up their gills or something. I may need to clean the containers with a brush instead of just rinsing them.
Oh well. Some losses were to be expected from a first-time newt breeder. We'll see how they are tomorrow; at least they're eating heartily. |
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| We lost four newtlets today. I don't know what caused it, but the container they were in didn't seem to be completely clean. It had some sort of slime or mucous that didn't wash out with hot water alone. If that's what caused it, it may have clogged up their gills or something. I may need to clean the containers with a brush instead of just rinsing them.
Oh well. Some losses were to be expected from a first-time newt breeder. We'll see how they are tomorrow; at least they're eating heartily. |
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| 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. ( Newts inside. ) |
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| I've started a new LJ community: amphibilove . For all those who love amphibians, such as the anura, the caudata and the gymnophonia (who live underground, have no legs and get up to 1,5 metres long, and of whom I'd never heard in my life before today). It's hard to believe, but up til now, LiveJournal had no serious community for talking about newts and frogs. Unless we count Gussie Fink-Nottle's Newt Fanciers' Group ( gfnnfg ). This doesn't mean that I'll stop my newt postings here. I just may put the more... technical stuff over there. I hope the new(t) community gets lots of members and interesting posts! |
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| It's hard to tell but it does look that way. ( Under a cut, because I'm that kind of person. ) Of course, we can't actually see their little mouths open and close, so when we see one of them hop forward a centimeter, we just assume he or she is hunting. And if we're right, we should see them getting bigger soon! 12 larvae are in the Chinese take out containers so far. And it looks like there are another five or so eggs left. |
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| Well, I'm not sure they're eating yet... but apart from that, they're doing well. Five of them are now over three days old; another five have hatched, but one of those doesn't look very good. He's sort of bent and his gills seem underdeveloped. We'll have to see if he starts looking better soon. Here's a picture of three from the first batch with a one cent coin placed underneath the container, so that at least those of you who live in the Eurozone will get some idea of their current size:
The coin looks oddly shaped because of distortion by the water. The red blobs are cyclops: water fleas. Too large for the larvae to eat right now, but it was worth a try. We'll try to breed them so the larvae can eat them later, when they've grown a little. The tiny specs are sea monkeys or brine shrimp. Those seem more suitable. In fact, stoneshop just told me he saw one of the larvae eating them. W00t! Now let's hope this little pioneer will tell the others how to do that. |
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| Look what came out of one of the newt eggs. It's an itsy bitsy teeny weeny little baby fire bellied newt! It's about 1 cm long. There will probably be more in the morning. I've prepared a setup for hatching sea monkeys (brine shrimp), which takes about a day, so I can feed those to the newt larvae tomorrow. It's a tough world... eat or be eaten! |
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| ...and then it may. Below is a fuzzy picture of a tiny little baby newt inside a newt egg. It's in the middle of the picture. Most of the eggs are rolled into leaves, so you can't take a picture of them at all; this one is between two leaves of a Java fern. I have put the plants that have eggs in them in two small tanks, so no one gets to eat the eggs or the larvae; there are about 10 eggs in there, maybe more. They are about two or three mm in size; that is slightly smaller than a grain of black pepper, a bit like the size of a coriander seed, maybe even smaller than that. It's not uncommon for the eggs to die and get moldy in this stage, so I'm not counting on any results, but so far, all the eggs that I can see appear to be doing fine. I've been watching the dots inside them grow for a couple of days weeks now. I've decided to try to raise the larvae. It's fairly complicated but I'll just give it my best shot and see how far we get. Isn't it exciting? |
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| I'm a gecko!" I've never seen newts climb up against the glass like this before. It sure looks funny and it makes me glad the tank is well sealed. |
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| Tiny, fire-bellied ones, of course. Things are going well in the newt tank. I was getting a little worried about my new newts, because they don't swim very much and I couldn't figure out how to feed them since they normaly eat in the water. Today I served them a dinner of bloodworms in a small plastic dish on the island. Bingo! Soon, two of them were happily stuffing their little faces. The other two are fat enough so I wasn't worried about them anyway. As for the nice silvery little fishes polishing the windows and the pebbles, they are no longer with us. They were apparently too small and far too tasty to live with newts for a prolonged period. It's a shame really because they were so cute and I enjoyed watching them at work. But the nice lady at the aquarium store, who told me that they'd be allright in there with the newts, took pity on me and gave me an Ancistrus instead. It's as big as the newts are, so not very likely to get eaten; it looks rather intimidating, too. It's a vegetarian, though, and eats nothing but algae. Here's a picture of a similar fish. Nice, huh? Mine hasn't got such pretty white polkadots, but who knows what it'll look like later. I like the way it looks a bit prehistorical, like a dinosaur with fins on. |
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