Straight out of the Jurassic period

NEWTS are not animals I see very often so when I met someone who said he had them in his garden pond I was keen to have a look.

He approached quietly and lifted a loose flap of plastic pond-liner. Underneath, rather disappointingly, were about a dozen frogs.

But his hand shot down among the frogs and came up with the real prize — a male newt in full breeding colours.

It was quite a spectacular sight, not very large, maybe eight or nine centimetres long, but so outlandish in appearance that it looked as though it should have become extinct some time in the Jurassic.

The shape was vaguely lizard-like, though of course lizards are reptiles and newts are amphibians so the two are not remotely related. It had a bright-orange belly and a brownish back covered in spots and stripes with a long, wavy crest from head to tail.

It was a smooth newt, also called a common newt, which is the only species found in Ireland. There are other newts in Britain and on the continent.

I had a quick look and then my friend released it. Newts are air breathers so it wasn’t going to suffocate out of the water but amphibians are cold-blooded and on a cool spring day the heat of a human hand can cause them damage.

They spend about half the year living in water. In Ireland this is normally from some time in mid-March until September or October. Then they come out on land and soon search out a suitable spot to hibernate in until the following spring. This is often under a stone or a rotten log. When they’re not hibernating they’re quite nocturnal and prefer damp or boggy places.

In spring and summer they prefer shallow, still water with plenty of submerged vegetation such as ponds, flooded ditches and lake margins, though they’re also found in canals.

They’re completely carnivorous from the time they’re small tadpoles. On land they feed on things like insects, slugs and worms which they catch by shooting out their long tongues in the same way frogs and toads do. But this doesn’t work under water where they have to use their small teeth to grab hold of shrimps, water lice, insect larvae and frog tadpoles.

THEY DON’T become sexually mature until they’re three years old and the average life expectancy is about six, though a lifespan of 20 years has been recorded. They shed their skins frequently. A growing newt may do this as often as once a week. And I have absolutely no idea why they’re associated, in a popular phrase, with drunkenness. After we put the newt back I had a look at the frogs. Frogs spend far less of their life in and around water than newts do. In Ireland frogs only take to water for about four to six weeks in spring in order to breed and the rest of the year they’re land animals.

I was interested in the colour of the frogs in the pond. They varied from a yellowish green through to dark brown. Frogs have a chameleon-like ability to alter their skin pigment to camouflage themselves.

The garden I was in was on a mineral soil ‘island’ close to a peat bog.

The frogs had obviously travelled some distance to breed in the pond — the brown ones had come from the peat bog and the yellow and green ones from grassland (the lower part of grass stems is often yellow due to a lack of light). But none of them had adapted to the black background of the pond liner. Either they had only just arrived or it takes them longer to adapt than I thought.