Syneyed

An autumn day trip deep in the Cascades. Very cold morning meant catching the mist on the river as the day warmed up.

A big, near full minute long, firework finale. Enjoy!

This beautiful blue betta fish really doesn't like the camera! See it flaring it's fins and swimming aggressively!

A short video of Loki basking and relaxing in the sun. It's been rainy the last couple of weeks so he's loving this!

Loki is at it again! This time he's hanging out with his best friend in the back yard. Rosie is a 10 month old pit/lab mix and they were the same size the day they met...only the day they met! 🤣

This is the biggest hail I've ever seen in Western Washington! June 6th 2020!

Hey everyone! So waking up on day 8 we discovered that about half the eggs seem to have hatched out. We were able to see 4 individually but they have a LOT of hiding places! We also went out and got some local pond water and aquatic plants like duckweed. We are keeping these micro ecosystems in jars on our window sill and they are full of life! Aside from that the tadpoles are still voracious eaters and growing at a quicker rate since installing the tank heater. That seems to have also helped the eggs develop a little faster as well!

Loki the Chiweenie is exploring a new creek at a recently re-opened park today. He does NOT like this water! 🤣

Hello! Welcome back for day 7 of the PNW Salamander eggs videos. I was unable to get a video for day 6. In the morning, nothing had really changed except the tadpoles were quickly running out of food and going after the egg sac. We dropped a couple slices of cucumber and headed back to the woods. As you may have noticed, there is grass now! There are a few more things we changed that led to the tank being cloudy for the rest of the day. We went to near where we got them to begin with and picked up a algae covered rocks, small sticks and aquatic grasses to add to the tank. The newly hatched salamanders seems to be loving hiding in the roots. I will be getting a better video with all of the changes this evening after we install the tank heater and temperature gauge to help these little guys develop! Off to the pet store for now!

This is day 5 since we picked up the clutch...we are very impatiently waiting them to finish development and break free their gelatinous blob prison! In the meantime, the tadpoles have done a wonderful job of cleaning up the algae; however we are now running into the issue of them having enough to eat! We turned off the filter for the day and might go get some fun stuff to add to their environment. Hopefully that will also bring more algae and some microbes for the salamanders when they do finally hatch.

As promised this is the update video of the rest of the changes we've made so far. As you can see there is 2 types of grass spread around and they are rooting well. We've added a couple algae covered rocks to feed the tadpoles and some rich pond water for microorganisms. We've determined these to be Spotted Salamanders by the egg sack and what the few that have hatched look like. We originally thought the tadpoles were Northern Green Tree Frogs but have also determined that they are in fact Cascade Frogs or Nava Cascaeda. I have a seperate container for the frogs when they start to develop legs and stop eating. They will be released into our backyard that is against a green belt with a pond less than 50 feet away when ready.

This is day 4 since we picked up the clutch. We put the frog tadpoles back in the tank hoping more salamanders would hatch(they weren't doing well in their new enclosure anyway) it hasn't seemed to make a difference but they'll be coming back out once they start to form legs. We still only have the 1 early hatch and still waiting on the rest of them. Shouldn't be too much longer...

This little grey stripe in the center of the screen was an early hatch. He looks to be doing well and is already developing back legs!

They look to be about a day off from hatching. They are "twitching" about twice an hour now and have almost outgrown their eggs! Next video is one that hatched early. It's already developing its back legs!

Turn your volume up on this one...front flip fail because "I didn't tuck!" 🤣🤣🤣

We picked these Salamander eggs up from a nasty pond in the PNW mountains in the name of conservation with a few tadpoles. They should be hatching within the next 3 days and I'll be uploading daily; follow me to watch them finally hatch!

Loki is a 7lb 1.5 year old chiweenie. He loves laying in the sun!

Short video showcasing our new tadpole friends! They will be hatched, allowed to turn into frogs and released for conservation.

His name wasn't Jonny, it was Joshua. 🤣