salamanders Help!

[bhelme]

Salamanders get in your pool because they like water. Has it rained before they get in? That's how it works at our house. Just scoop 'em, 'cause animal control will laugh at you! They do no harm, but if you leave them in they will add a ton of contaminants which will require work on your part to eliminate (ie lots and lots of chlorine). It doesn't matter what the water chemistry is, they'll get in - they just won't last long.

[waste]

I had meant to post to this right after Thanksgiving. This is because over the course of the weekend at my brother's house, we took the kids to the nature center - usually not a big thrill for me, but with daughter and nephews, it was pretty cool.
The point of this is that one of the displays was on salimanders, I recognised the 2 I see in pools here in Ct - little ~beige w/ red stripe and the larger blue/ black yellow spotted ones (sorry, I didn't write down the latin names). What I picked up from the accompanying info was these critters (salimanders in general) tend to lay their eggs in 'vernal pools' (the real reason for the delay in posting is that I couldn't figure out how to spell 'vernal' - I thought there was another vowel betwixt the 'r' and 'n' ). The vernal pools are the result of winter thaw and spring rains forming pools in low lying areas which dry up as the summer progresses. As they are seasonal or temporary pools, no fish can inhabit them (fish seem to have a fondness for feeding upon salimander eggs and/ or baby salimanders), so salimanders take up residence in these pools in the spring, propogate like bunnies and they and their chilluns move on to wetter areas when the pool dries up, ie - your pool.
From my experience with these guys, they're fairly harmless -I've never been able goad one into attacking me . However, you'd probably be happier without them in your pool, and they'd probably be happier without all that chlorine. I'd do as Birddog said and scoop them out, they're just trying to get by in this world as are we, but they might just return.

I'm going to assume that you live near to an area which will support a vernal pool (woods, etc), if you can figure out which direction they are comming from, you might be able to stop them. If it's feasible, could you make a small 'pond' for them to occupy instead of your pool? You'd either want some sort of circulation or chlorine in there to keep it from becomming a breeding ground for mosquitos (et al), but I don't think it'd be a major money investment - you could even make a nice little waterfall/ basin to work into your landscaping -- a very small pump to run the waterfall (moving water inhibits mosquitos), some copper algicide (not something for swimming pools, but very nice for 'natural' water situations) and perhaps a couple of tablespoons of di-chlor every other week (the chlorine and cya wouldn't be much - the salimanders don't seem to mind it, but mosquitos do). This is just a 'thought experiment' on my part, but it seems, at first glance, to be an environmentally friendly (your pool isn't!) answer to the salimander problem - heck, you might even be able to be subsidised by the local Audobon/ nature center.

Just wanted to share this with you (all). I did not include a lot of what I was going to originally (design, poential problebs, etc), in order to keep this post '~fairly short', if anyone has more to say about this, there may be an upcomming market for 'ecofriendly' swimming pool supliments.