Wild Things: My life among salamanders

A red-backed salamander. (Ed Kanze photos)

A red-backed salamander in a child's hand.

Salamander eggs

By ED KANZE

One of my early memories, from age 3 or 4, revolves around my older sister, Maggie, herself about 5 or 6, running into our childhood home in a state of great excitement. Under a rock in the backyard, she’d found a lizard. One of our schoolteacher parents (might have been our mother, might have been our father) gently pointed out that the lizard was in fact a salamander. This meant, we were told, an amphibian rather than a reptile. The distinction didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. But I was transfixed by the presence of such a marvel of nature within a 100 feet of our back door.

My sister led me outside, and I held the little animal in my hands. That was all it took. I’ve been captivated by salamanders ever since.

I now know that the superficially lizard-like creature my big sister found was a red-backed salamander. It had the wet, slimy, unscaled skin typical of amphibians, was colored a rusty brown, had four evenly sized legs and a tail, and measured about the length of one of my forefingers. 

The red-backed salamander could be dismissed as a small, inconsequential creature hardly worthy of a grown person’s notice. But inconsequential it is not. Scientists tell us that red-backed salamanders, if we could catch and weigh them all in a given patch of eastern forest, would exceed in mass the collective weight of any other vertebrate, including the black bear. 

Given such astonishing abundance, the red-backed salamander must be a major player in forest ecology. The exact size and shape of its impacts in the scheme of things is poorly known, but surely it plays an outsized role in the dynamics of predators and prey. An adept predator despite its small size, the red-back eats a great many things, such as insects, spiders, small crustaceans, earthworms, and even its own kind. It is also eaten by other creatures, including garter snakes, birds, raccoons, skunks, frogs, and other salamanders.

Red-backed salamanders have no lungs. Their ancestors had lungs, but the group of salamanders that include the red-back dispensed with them during their evolution. They are sustained by oxygen that dissolves in their wet skin and mouth linings.

If that’s not amazing enough, consider this. If a salamander such as the red-back loses a limb or an eye or a tail, and all goes well otherwise, it grows the missing part back. The replacement is pretty much a perfect replica of the original. By contrast, the replacement tails of lizards tend to be functional but not half as good-looking as the originals.

An especially cool thing about the red-backed salamander is that, unlike most amphibians, it doesn’t have to tramp downhill to a watery place to breed. Instead, it courts and competes with rivals and mates where it lives, which is to say, in damp soil often under stones and rotting logs.

When you go looking for red-backed salamanders, you may find females curled around eggs. Sometimes the eggs are white and opaque, yet when they’re nearly ready to hatch, the membranes are clear, and you can see the nearly mature larvae inside, almost ready to get up and go. Red-backed salamanaders go through the larval stage (a salamander’s version of a frog’s tadpole phase) inside the eggs. They hatch out as miniature versions of the adults. 

Occasionally I’ve crossed paths with people so protective of salamanders that they insist the creatures should never be handled. My thinking is that, in moderation, they can be handled, gently, with care and with hands doused with water and free of sunscreen and insect repellent. The water helps protect their skin and keep them in oxygen. Holding a salamander even once can be life-changing.