Red Spotted Newt
All About the Red Spotted Newt
The red spotted newt has a complex lifestyle. It begins its life in the water, and then it grows into a terrestrial young adult who is called a red eft. Efts are brightly colored, usually dull red or orange, or orange-red. After a few years, the eft migrates back to where it was originally bred, and transforms into an adult water-dweller.
The adults, although they live in the water, have lungs instead of gills. The adult coloring is more dull than that of the efts; they are usually dark greenish-brown, brown or olive green, with yellow bellies. Their dorsal area has between three and seven red spots that are bordered in black. The red spotted newt grows from two and a quarter inches to nearly five inches. The males of the species have dark spots on their back legs, and a high tail fin, during the season when they breed.
Red-spotted newts range from Canada in the north to Georgia and Alabama in the south. In the Midwest United States, the species is found in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.
The adult red spotted newt is often found in clean, calm bodies of water, including quiet streams, ditches, marshes, small lakes and ponds. You can even catch sight of them swimming in open water that may be forty feet deep. If their watery areas become too shallow, they will migrate back onto land, where they spent their younger years. When living on land, efts will stay mainly in upland areas that are wooded and moist. They can even be seen roaming out in the open in those areas. Their diet is made up mostly of invertebrates that they find after rains, in leaf litter.
Red spotted newts are fairly common throughout the areas they inhabit. Unlike some of the other species of salamanders, the red spotted newt can survive and thrive in ponds that also have fish in them. They require a variety of habitat areas, since they use the water and the land in their life cycles. Operations of forestry companies in upland wooded areas can destroy the red spotted eft's habitat, as well as that of the adults who might migrate back onto land. Conversions of wetlands could be disastrous for all the life stages of the red-spotted newt. This newt maintains a very specific area of range, which they don't often stray from.
The red spotted newt's life span is about twenty years. They breed generally in April or May, and after three or four weeks, the eggs hatch. In the water phase of life, the newt is dark green with spots of dark red. On the land, it is light orange. The females don't take care of their eggs, so they lay about 200-400 of them at once, and they are covered with a substance like Jello. Efts eat mainly spiders, and insects like flies and caterpillars.