Nov 09 2009
What Do Salamanders Eat?
During one of our summer camping outings to the New Hampshire White Mountains this year, my daughters made a very cool discovery resulting in one of them asking me, what do salamanders eat? Do you know the answer? I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t know the answer right off the top of my head, but after we did a little research about the little critter that my daughters found, we knew everything we could ever want to know about the little guy.
As you might have noticed from the recent post on Maine animal shelters, we’re animal lovers in this family, so looking into what do salamanders eat with my daughters was a great adventure.
The Investigation Into What Do Salamanders Eat
The way it happened was like this. We arrived at the campsite close to suppertime. So after setting up the tent and getting things squared away, my wife and I started cooking supper as the girls went into exploring mode around the campsite. Usually, exploring involves hunting around the campsite for interesting rocks, sticks or sometimes interesting insects. Just as supper was almost ready, I heard both girls exclaim, “Oooh! Daddy, look what we found!” The two of them were staring at the ground, which I thought was very odd.
So, cautiously I walked over to where they were standing and saw this little guy crawling along on the ground.
Now, we’ve spent enough time in the woods of Maine and New Hampshire to recognize this little crawly as a salamander, but I honestly didn’t know what kind it was. There are many different varieties and both states. We were camping near a body of water, so I was pretty sure it was a species that lived near a water supply.
The girls watched it for a while, and when it didn’t move they occasionally nudged it along with a small twig. When supper was ready, they left our new little friend alone and came over to feast on hot dogs, cucumbers and Pringles - our traditional “first meal” at camp. Twenty minutes later, the girls went to check out where the salamander was earlier, and sure enough the little guy had barely moved an inch.
We took these photos so that later we could do some research and find out the exact species. A few days later, once we were home from our camping trip, we started to do a little bit of sleuthing. It didn’t take very long for us to learn from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department that our visiting friend was actually actually an Eastern Red-Spotted Newt.
Credit: New Hampshire Fish & Wildlife
Sure enough, the NH Fish & Wildlife website reported that the newt is an aquatic species, and it had just rained the night before we saw it, which would explain why it was basking nearby our campsite. The bright skin color warns predators that eating the little newt would be toxic - and the scent of the skin secretions warn them as well. But still, the question remained - what do they eat? The answer came from the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity website.
“The aquatic larvae eat small invertebrates including water fleas, snails, and beetle larvae; the terrestrial efts eat small invertebrates, mainly those found in humus and leaf litter, including snails, spring tails, and soil mites; the adult newts eat mainly midge larva and other aquatic immature stages of insects. Adults don’t have a specialized diet, eating any small invertebrate that they can find. (Behler, King, and 1979, 1998; Petranka, 1998)”
So, finally I could answer my daughter’s question - salamanders eat itsy bitsy little invertebrate bugs!
If your kids are anything like mine, they’ll love the huge wall mural shown here titled “A World of Animals” produced by National Geographic. Exploring the world of animals with your kids is a lot of fun, and you get to learn new things yourself, which is always fun. I’m looking forward to what sort of creatures we discover on our camping trips next year!
