Eastern Newt

The eastern newt is native to a large part of eastern North America, from the Great Lakes and southern Canada south to the Gulf Coast. It has an unusually complex life cycle: an aquatic, gilled larva transforms into a bright orange-red terrestrial juvenile known as a red eft, which may wander on land for one to several years before returning to water and transforming again into an olive-green, aquatic adult. The eft stage's vivid coloration is a textbook example of aposematic warning display, advertising the strong tetrodotoxin-based skin toxins that make the species unpalatable to most predators at every life stage. Adults typically live in ponds, marshes, and slow streams, and both the terrestrial eft and aquatic adult forms remain common across much of the species' range.