My fire salamanders arrived. I bought 5 of them; a sexed pair of S.s.terrestris sub-adults, 2 S.s.gallacia juveniles and 1 S.s.crespoi juvenile, and I've housed them in 3 vivariums. One of the S.s.terrestris sub-adults climbed onto my hand and said hello while I was unboxing them, and the gallacia juveniles are following each other around and hunting flies.
I also bought some more axolotl eggs.
You would have made a very nice Naturalist in Victorian times. There was a small, but important current of nature enthuasists in my time.
Living in Victorian times would have sucked though, so I don't mind if I missed out on being placed alongside Darwin and Mendel in the high-school biology textbooks.
I'm a bit concerned about one of the salamanders; it's one of the sub-adults, and it hasn't explored it's new habitat like it's partner and the juveniles did, or eaten anything. It's moved around a little bit, but hasn't ventured out of the plastic tub that it arrived in. It's partner found a place for a burrow and stayed there for a couple of hours, but when the other one didn't join it, it went back into the plastic tub and has been lying on top of the other one for the past few hours, and looks like it's protecting it from a menacing woodlouse that's sitting in the corner of the tub.
The juveniles have been busy exploring and sampling the various foods that I've presented them with. Judging by their reactions, woodlice are ok, but a bit hard to swallow, millipedes taste yucky, various flightless flies are tasty and fun to hunt, waxworms are delicious and strips of chicken are very nice, if nutritionally incomplete. They're all very tame; they don't seem to mind my presence at all, and the juveniles have been taking food straight from my hand.
