Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Newt News

So, a few days ago Adele and I collected some tadpoles out of our neighbor's ditch and as we were watching them I thought I saw a fish in the tank.  A few days later as I was changing the water I tried to catch the "fish" so I could show it to Adele. Well... the "fish" had legs and a tail!  It was actually a baby newt, a semi-aquatic lizard.  It still had it's external gills.  We kept it for a few days and Adele took it to school to show her friends.  It really was cool and amazing to see how small it was. Another thing that was cool but gross was that we learned that tadpoles actually don't eat just algae or decaying matter in the water, which is what I thought, but they actually eat worms and sometimes other tadpoles.  So, this was brought to my attention when I saw several of the tadpoles actually biting and pulling on this worm that was in the water. Honestly, they looked like piranha.  So be warned!  Do they even have teeth?

2 comments:

Tess said...

Just the other day I saw our newt in the container with the tadpoles and now he does have gills. So i guess when we first found him--he was very very small.

Anonymous said...

That is CRAZY!!