Northern Dusky Salamander

Fascinating facts about the Northern Dusky Salamander

• A female can lay anywhere from eight to forty-five eggs, most commonly between ten and thirty, tucked under logs, moss or stream-bank rocks where the soil stays wet. She guards the clutch for six to ten weeks, roughly 45 to 60 days, until the embryos hatch. Parental attendance is so vital that abandoned clutches often suffer 100 % mortality.
• In the north they cling to saturated soils beside springs, seepages and tiny headwater tributaries, while southern populations favor floodplains, sloughs and muddy upland streams. Their range stretches from New Brunswick and southern Quebec, down the Atlantic seaboard to South Carolina, covering roughly 5 % of the global distribution in Canada alone. This tight link to clean, flowing water means any drop in stream quality, from pollution to altered flow, can have significant impacts on local populations.
• Even though the global IUCN rating is Least Concern, the species is listed as Endangered in Ontario, where fewer than 250 individuals are thought to remain. the adult population exceeds 100,000, but local densities can be very low, especially where streams have been polluted or acidified, a problem affecting 40 % of southern Appalachian waterways. These contrasting numbers show that while the salamander is secure in parts of its range, isolated populations can vanish quickly without clean, stable headwater habitats.
• Adults can stretch up to 14 cm, yet most males average 9.4 cm and females 8.6 cm. they have no lungs; they "breathe" by soaking oxygen through their skin and the thin membranes inside their mouth and throat.
• When a predator grabs its tail, the salamander can snap it off, a process called autotomy, and the missing piece regrows later, though often looking slightly different. About half of adult dusky salamanders carry a missing or regrown tail.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia
• Animal Diversity Web

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