N
ever seen a newt? Picture a lizard that’s
been too long in the bath. Softer, spongier,
wrinklier. Newts love water, but, being
amphibians, also spend lots of their lives on
land. In fact, they sleep away half the year
or more in hibernation, buried beneath a
log, stone or deep in soil. A damp place is always preferable:
death by desiccation is a newt’s worst nightmare.
Spring, and sex, stirs newts from their slumber. Over
the last month, adults have been returning to ancestral
ponds for the breeding season. Amorous males, normally
a non-uniform brown, are dressed up to the nines in spots
and stripes, with yolk-yellow undersides and crests that
ripple along the length of their spines. They follow females
through the weeds, wafting pheromones towards them by
frantically fanning their frilly tails. This sensuous foreplay
ends in something of an anti-climax when the male drops
a perfunctory parcel of sperm (called a spermatophore)
on the f loor of the pond for his partner to collect.
Newts lay eggs singly, rather than in clumps or strings
as frogs and toads do. The female newt, using her hind
legs, wraps each one (and bear in mind that she might
produce as many as 300 eggs) in the leaf of an aquatic
plant – often water mint or water forget-me-not – carefully
concealing her precious progeny from potential predators.
The tadpoles that emerge then leave the pond at the end
of summer as adolescent newtlets or ‘efts’.In the carefree days of the 1980s, I fished for newts
with my friend in a shallow farm pond on the edge of our
Somerset village – and we caught plenty of them. They were
mostly Smooth newts, the most widespread and common
species found in the UK (and the only one in Northern
Ireland). Palmate newts are paler and slightly smaller,
but so similar that the two can be tricky to tell apart. The
godfather of our native newts is the Great Crested – the
largest species (almost twice the size of the other two) and
also the rarest. The fully protected status of Great Crested
newts means their discovery, and any possible disturbance,
can literally stop developers in their tracks. Now, children
would be breaking the law by catching them, but, back
then, we pulled them out of the pond without a worry. And
putting them in jars meant we could study them from all
angles. The breeding males were the best of all – ominously
dark with warty skin, silver-streaked tails and deeply
jagged backs. These little black dragons looked like they
could have breathed fire if they’d wanted to: after all,
we could see it burning in their bright orange bellies.
Sadly, loss of habitat – the number of ponds in the British
countryside has halved in the last 50 years or so – and
pollution has hit newts hard (particularly the Great Crested).
If there’s one thing a newt needs, it’s water. These spirited
creatures will quickly colonise a new pond, so if you want to
help (and, quite frankly, why wouldn’t you?), then you could
ILLUSTRATION: ZUZA MIŚKO do worse than head out into the garden and get digging.Words: PETE DOMMETT
A
N^
AP
PRECIATION^ OF (^) T
HE
NEW
T
N
ever seen a newt? Picture a lizard that’s
been too long in the bath. Softer, spongier,
wrinklier. Newts love water, but, being
amphibians, also spend lots of their lives on
land. In fact, they sleep away half the year
or more in hibernation, buried beneath a
log, stone or deep in soil. A damp place is always preferable:
death by desiccation is a newt’s worst nightmare.
Spring, and sex, stirs newts from their slumber. Over
the last month, adults have been returning to ancestral
ponds for the breeding season. Amorous males, normally
a non-uniform brown, are dressed up to the nines in spots
and stripes, with yolk-yellow undersides and crests that
ripple along the length of their spines. They follow females
through the weeds, wafting pheromones towards them by
frantically fanning their frilly tails. This sensuous foreplay
ends in something of an anti-climax when the male drops
a perfunctory parcel of sperm (called a spermatophore)
on the f loor of the pond for his partner to collect.
Newts lay eggs singly, rather than in clumps or strings
as frogs and toads do. The female newt, using her hind
legs, wraps each one (and bear in mind that she might
produce as many as 300 eggs) in the leaf of an aquatic
plant – often water mint or water forget-me-not – carefully
concealing her precious progeny from potential predators.
The tadpoles that emerge then leave the pond at the end
of summer as adolescent newtlets or ‘efts’.
In the carefree days of the 1980s, I fished for newts
with my friend in a shallow farm pond on the edge of our
Somerset village – and we caught plenty of them. They were
mostly Smooth newts, the most widespread and common
species found in the UK (and the only one in Northern
Ireland). Palmate newts are paler and slightly smaller,
but so similar that the two can be tricky to tell apart. The
godfather of our native newts is the Great Crested – the
largest species (almost twice the size of the other two) and
also the rarest. The fully protected status of Great Crested
newts means their discovery, and any possible disturbance,
can literally stop developers in their tracks. Now, children
would be breaking the law by catching them, but, back
then, we pulled them out of the pond without a worry. And
putting them in jars meant we could study them from all
angles. The breeding males were the best of all – ominously
dark with warty skin, silver-streaked tails and deeply
jagged backs. These little black dragons looked like they
could have breathed fire if they’d wanted to: after all,
we could see it burning in their bright orange bellies.
Sadly, loss of habitat – the number of ponds in the British
countryside has halved in the last 50 years or so – and
pollution has hit newts hard (particularly the Great Crested).
If there’s one thing a newt needs, it’s water. These spirited
creatures will quickly colonise a new pond, so if you want to
help (and, quite frankly, why wouldn’t you?), then you could
ILLUSTRATION: ZUZA MIŚKO do worse than head out into the garden and get digging.
Words: PETEDOMMETT
A
N
AP
PRECIATION OF T
HE
NEW
T