Fire Salamander Tips!

[reptiles4life]

Hey, i just picked up a fire salamander at the show, and i was wondering if anyone has any tips. i have him/her it a 10gallon with spagumn moss and a piece of cork to hide under, with a water bowl. eats like a champ(loves wax worms).

Thanks,
Kody

[Ciddian]

awesome! Hope he does well. Water changes are critical as salamanders and froggies are sensitive that way. I found my fire sal loved to burrow and enjoyed a good misting.

Hope he or she does well!! :)

[reptiles4life]

Thanks!

[sevenofthorns]

I would recommend housing it on soil, as sometimes mosses can be too acidic for salamanders.

Also you want to try to get your fire eating earthworms, as those are the perfect feeder for salamanders and very typical about what they would eat in the wild. Using waxies, crickets, etc for variety is still a good idea though, but the core of the diet that I use with all my animals is earthworms.

10G may be a bit of wasted space (vertically). You may wish to look into getting one of those underbed sweater boxes (or something similar) that has minimal height but lots of width and length. This will provide the animal with maximum surface area.

Cork bark hide will work well, just watch that it doesn't get mouldy from the humidty.

Last suggestion would be to slope the soil in the setup so that one side has a very thin layer, and the other end has a thick layer of soil. This allows you to pour water into the shallow end, creating a moisture gradiant so the animal can choose how wet they would like to be.

Overall, very beautiful and easy species to work with, pretty good first time caudata choice as well.

You can find an indepth caresheet on www.caudata.org/cc/

Also I would not recommend keeping a water source in there unless breeding is attempted, as they can drown if the water is not easy to get out of. Misting them weekly and using the moisture gradiant I mentioned above would suit them very well.

Feel free to ask me about anything.

[reptiles4life]

Sweet Thanks