If I understand your questions:

I have not keep eastern spotted newts with fire belly toads. Although the housing requirement are similar, each doing well in 5-6 inches of water, I find the newts are too "shy" around the boisterous toads.

I kept firebelly toads (2) with anoles (2) in a 50g terrarium setup, complete with waterfall and "pond". Both naturally live in a similar environment, but occupy different niches within that environment. I put the two together because once the crickets made it onto the plants the toads could not get to them, so I needed somethink higher in the tank to eat the crickets that escaped the toads. Also in this set up I have a few guppies. The "pond" was about 4-5 inches deep and planted. I use cork flats to separate the "land" from the water areas, and run the cork the entire length of the tank, in the case of the 50 gallon breeder tank (36Lx18Dx16H) the division ran the 36" length. I wish I had pictures of this set up. I still have it, but now it is being used as a fish tank... the cork in actually still in place and the back of it is filled in causing a wonderful terrace affect in the tank.

I have seen firebelly toads kept in "dry" tanks with only a bowl of water. But my experince has been that the toads appear to perfer as much water as they can be given and appear to "enjoy" swimming. With the combination (toads, anoles and guppies) the only issue that I dealt with was that one of the anoles would dive into the water to catch a guppy and eat it. He only went after the red tailed guppies leaving the blue tailed ones alone. I liked the anoles more that I liked the guppies so I did not actually care. I eventually end up with only blue tailed guppies. Never before had I seen or even heard of an anole doing that... I even had other people see it in action to try to find some sort of explaination for his behavior. We came up with not a clue as to why he wanted fish or why he only went for the red tailed ones.

When I kept viridenscens (mature eastern spotteds) in the past I started with only three (3), which turned out to be one male, two females. They were set up in a 15g tank with 1/4 - 1/3 covered by a "floating island", which I made from a shallow plastic bowl filled with soil, heavily planted, and supported from benenth to keep the lip about at the water level, and also secured to a side of the tank. In this tank the newts bred. I moved the eggs to another tank. I did not expect that many to hatch so I felt forced to move them into a baby wading pool, as they morphed into red efts I moved them into a second wading pool made into a forest floor. I built a "lip" or hang-over of anout 4-5 inches the rim of the wading pool with window screening to make sure that the red efts did not climb out of the pool. As they began to mature into eastern spotted, I sold or gave away around 50, the remainder, I released into a deeply wooded area where I had once seen some -- they are native to PA.

I am currently houseing 6 red efts in a well planted 30g terrarium. In this are only shallow bowls of water, which currently they do not use. Also, currently I am keeping 3 fire belly newts in a 35hex tank, and the bumblebee toads are in a seperate planted 15g terrarium. Please see pictures.






These pictures were each taken within a week of their construction. Now, months later, there has been a great deal of plant growth. And I should add with the hex tank... the water level is higher, and the little plastic frog has been removed. I don't yet have pictures of the bumblebee tank, but is currently is too overgrown and I am in the process of creating another tank for them.

I hope that my explainations as well as the pictures help to to convey what I do and how I do it. Again, grossly under populate, and I try to make the glass box as interesting as possible for the inhabitants.

As always, I do welcome your input.