The salamandridae family.

Part one the common newt.

Although common newts live in their breeding pools for most of the spring, they will spend most of the summer and autumn on land. The smooth newt is another name for the common newt as well. Most common newts will hibernate on land during late autumn and winter. They won`t go far from their breeding pools so lush pasture, open woodland or scrub land are good places to find newts. It is hard to tell the males and females apart outside of the breeding season, but the males have a bright orange underside with dark spots on their throats and bellies during the breeding season. Whereas the females will have quite a pale underside. The male also has a wavy crest along its back and tail. The common newt is Britain's most widespread of all of our newts. Like all newts it has smooth, soft skin with a tail flattened at the sides. Their colour on land is yellow olive with the female being duller. They are about four inches long, from head to tail. The male will do a courtship ritual to attract the female, it will vibrate its tail in front of the female in distinctive fashion. The male will then deposit a sperm containing capsule called a spermatophore, this will be left in front of his mate who then manoeuvres herself so she can pick the capsule up with her cloaca. Fertilization then occurs inside the females body. The female will then after a few days start to lay her eggs individually. She will lay up to twelve per day in aquatic leaves, although she may lay a total of four hundred eggs. After about two to three weeks, depending on the water temperature the eggs hatch to become tadpoles, this is their larval stage. For the first few days the tadpoles live off any food left in their yolk sacks. After this the tadpoles start to eat freshwater plankton. Unlike frog tadpoles, newt tadpoles are carnivorous so they will live off mollusc's, insect larvae and similar foods. At first the tadpoles look like small fry, but later look more like the adults. But they have feathery external gills emerging from the head on either side. As the tadpoles grow, firstly they develop front legs then their back legs grow, then with growth in their lungs their gills eventually shrink. The tadpoles shifts from being  fully aquatic to possessing a body for a mostly terrestrial existence. A baby newt is called a eft. They leave the water after about ten weeks. Some tadpoles may over winter in the larval state and emerge the following spring. The newts then take about three years to become sexually mature. They will then return to the same breeding pools to start the process all over again. During the day common newts will hide under stones or logs, emerging on damp night to hunt slugs, insects and worms. Common newts are greedy hunters, using their sticky tongues to catch their prey. They swallow their prey whole, they track their prey with both  their sight and scent. Unlike lizards (which they look like) newts have no scales, they also move very slowly. Also newts will never bask in the sun unlike newts. Hedgehogs, rats and grass snakes are their biggest predators. All newts are protected bylaw in Europe, but in Britain it is only illegal to sell common newts under section five of the wildlife and countryside acts of 1981 with respect of sale only. Therefore their destruction or capture is still permitted, in my opinion though this should be changed as the greater crested and palmate newts are struggerling.