How to Take Care of a Salamander While Away on Vacation

Your Salamander can survive on its own for limited amounts of time if you prepare their environment before you head out on your vacation.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• A Good Friend.
• An accessible Salamander acquarium or habitat.
• Spare (live) food that can survive weeks.
• Separate habitat for the food.

1. Clean out the habitat.
   Whether your salamander is aquatic (likes wetlands) or terrestrial (like a dry environment) it is important to leave them in a clean habitat if you are planning to be away. This gives them the best chance to live healthy in your absence, and to keep them happy.
2. Find a Friend who can help you out.
   While you can leave your salamander on their own for up to a week at a time, if you are going to take longer than that for your vacation, you need to have a friend step in to help out. It will be important to have a friend or family member that can check in, and that won't be squeamish if they have to deal with the insects that are fed to your little critter.
3. Set up an Alternate Habitat for your salamanders food.
   If you are going to be gone for a week, and you don't want to force someone else to supply the food for your salamander, it could be ideal to set up a second habitat or aquarium in order to house your food before it is served. If you like to feed them crickets, you will need to have food for the crickets, or if you are someone that like to serve up worms, give them a moist setting full of dirt to keep them "fresh" for your pet. It is very important that this live food be served, because a lot of salamanders won't eat if they don't have prey that is moving.
4. Set Up the primary habitat to best suit a full week.
   If you are going to be away for more than 2 days, and have an aquatic salamander, you have to make sure they can stay wet. Typically you want to have a habitat that you are spraying down with water every couple of days to keep a moist area, but if you aren't able to do that, you want to make sure to have an area where the salamander can submerge themselves. It will serve almost like a pool, so that they can go down in it, and soak up the moisture that keeps them alive.
5. Set Up a dry-run with your Friend or family member.
   If you are going to be gone for longer than a week, have your friend or family member come over about a week before you leave to go over what the salamander will need. In fact, have them do the tasks of watering and feeding, just to make sure that they are very comfortable with the bugs and re-filling of the water supply. If someone isn't sure, they could make a mistake, so this dry-run will set everyone up to succeed. Plus, if you forgot to mention a detail, this will flush it out and make sure that your pet representative knows everything.
6. Leave a Little Cash just in case.
   If for some reason, your extra food has expired while you are gone, you don't want your friend or family member to have to decide whether or not to still feed it to your salamander. It will probably be a fruitless effort that could leave your pet hungry, and in an emergency, you will need your representative to go pick up something else. Leave all the information necessary, and some extra cash for them to use, so that they don't have to think twice about the purchase. The worst case scenario is that they pick up food, and you end up with extra food in the secondary habitat to use at a later date.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure you lay out exactly how your salamander needs to be treated when you are gone.
• Written instruction can always help as a back-up, just in case your care-giver forgets something.
• If you are only gone for a week or less, the salamander can be set up to take care of themselves
• Do not leave your salamander unattended for more than a week. As you need to feed them at least once a week, and leaving food in their habitat could cause them to over-eat, you have to be able to do it each week.