Amphibians
Newt
Pleurodelinae · also called eft
A newt is a salamander that keeps one foot in the pond. For most of the year it lives on land, hunting slugs and worms in the damp, but each spring it walks back to water, and the male grows a crest and performs an underwater dance, fanning a scent toward the female with his tail.
Overview
Newts are the members of the salamander family Salamandridae that make a strong seasonal move into water to breed. A newt has a slender body, a long tail, four legs, and, compared with other salamanders, a rougher, less slimy skin. Newts live in and around ponds, ditches, and marshes across Europe, Asia, and North America, hunting invertebrates and larvae in the water and on land.
Three lives
A newt hatches as a gilled aquatic larva, transforms into a land-living juvenile called an eft that may wander for one to three years, then matures and returns to a pond each spring as a breeding adult. In the breeding season the male grows a wavy crest and courts the female by arching his body and whipping his tail to waft a pheromone toward her.
Poison and regeneration
All newts have toxic skin, and the Pacific newts of North America carry tetrodotoxin, the pufferfish nerve poison, making them deadly to eat. Like other salamanders, newts can regrow a lost limb, tail, or even parts of the eye and heart, which is why they feature heavily in regeneration research. A female folds a leaf around each egg to hide it.
Status
Newts as a group are Not Evaluated. Many are common where ponds survive, but some are threatened, the great crested newt is strictly protected in Europe, and the loss and neglect of small ponds has reduced newts across farmed and built-up land.
Newt: common questions
What is the difference between a newt and a salamander?
All newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts. Salamander is the name for the whole order of tailed amphibians. Newt is a name applied to certain members of one family, the Salamandridae, that make a strong seasonal move into water to breed and back onto land afterward, and that tend to have drier, rougher skin than the fully terrestrial or fully aquatic salamanders. In practice, if you find a small tailed amphibian in a garden pond in spring, with a crest on the male and a habit of coming to the surface to gulp air, it is a newt. A lungless salamander of an Appalachian stream, or a giant permanently aquatic species like the hellbender, is a salamander but not a newt.
What is an eft?
An eft is the land-living juvenile stage of a newt. After hatching in the pond as a gilled larva and then transforming, a young newt leaves the water and lives on land, often for one to three years and sometimes longer, before it is mature enough to breed. During this eft phase the animal is usually a duller or, in the eastern newt of North America, a brilliant orange-red colour, and it roams through damp woodland and grassland hunting small invertebrates. When it reaches breeding age it develops adult colours and returns to a pond, and from then on it typically alternates between water in spring and land in late summer and winter.
Are newts poisonous?
Yes, to some degree, and a few are dangerously so. All newts produce toxins in their skin as a defence, and for most European species this simply makes them unpalatable, so the sensible advice is to handle them only with clean, wet hands and wash afterward, and never let a child put fingers in the mouth after touching one. The extreme cases are the Pacific newts of western North America, particularly the rough-skinned newt, whose skin carries tetrodotoxin, one of the most potent natural nerve poisons, in quantities that have killed people who swallowed a newt. Handling even these is safe as long as you do not ingest the toxin or rub it into your eyes.
How can I help newts in my garden?
The single most useful thing is a pond, ideally without fish, with a gently sloping edge and plenty of submerged and marginal plants for the newts to lay eggs on and for their larvae to hunt among. Around it, provide the damp cover newts need on land, such as log and rock piles, long grass, and dense low planting, and link these with hedges or borders rather than leaving bare open ground. Avoid slug pellets and other pesticides, which poison the invertebrates newts eat and the newts themselves, and check compost heaps and long grass before disturbing them, since newts shelter there. In much of Europe, the great crested newt is legally protected and its presence must be considered before pond or building work.