Salamanders

A recent post on Facebook asking to identify a salamander got me curious as to the difference between salamanders and newts, and a little research provided some very interesting answers to several different salamander questions.

There are several families of these amphibians. There are four families of entirely aquatic salamanders, those who live their entire life cycles completely in the water and cannot live long out of the water. The most common species in Missouri are mud puppies and hellbenders (if you can call hellbenders common). Those two are in separate families, but both live their entire lives underwater. You'll never see one out of the water unless it was taken from the water, and it won't live long out of the water. The two look very different, but the biggest real difference between them is that mud puppies have external gills, feathery reddish or pinkish structures that stick out from their necks. Hellbenders have internal gills with small gill openings to let the water in and out--and oddly, one gill opening is often completely closed.

The other two families of entirely aquatic salamanders are sirens and amphiumas, both of which are long and eel-like. Sirens have ONLY forelimbs, and they are very small. Amphiumas have both fore and hind limbs, but all are very small. Both are mainly confined to ditches and swamps of Southeast Missouri, and most people will never see one.

The newt family is interesting. It is represented by only one Missouri species, the central newt. And what makes newts different is that they go through THREE life stages. There is the entirely aquatic larval stage (kinda like a tadpole is the larval stage of a frog or toad). But before turning into an adult, a newt goes through an intermediate stage where it becomes an eft, and lives entirely on land. It remains an eft for two or three years, and THEN changes to the adult stage, and moves BACK into the water, becoming entirely aquatic. So you might see an eft out of the water, but you won't see an adult newt anywhere but in the water (they prefer fishless ponds).

There are two main dry land salamander families, the mole salamanders and the lungless salamanders. The adults of both families spend most of their time in moist but not wet places, like underneath forest debris and rocks--some live in caves. They do NOT need water except as a place to lay their eggs, as the larval stage IS aquatic, like frogs and toads. Members of the mole salamander family tend to be fairly large, thick-bodied, with thick tails. As you can guess from the name, some species live much of their lives underground. But mole salamanders have lungs and breathe like we do, more or less. Lungless salamanders, as you can guess, DON'T have lungs, they take in oxygen through their skins. They tend to be small and thinner bodied with long, thin tails.

So the next time you encounter a salamander somewhere out of the water, don't assume it needs to be IN the water. They do not. Just give it a chance to get under something, or leave it alone. They don't like bright sun and will get dried out if exposed to it too long, but ordinarily all they need is shade.