Conservation report
Samuel Turvey shines a spotlight on this strange 2m long amphibian.
The curious Chinese giant salamander
What’s so special about these giants?
Almost everything about them is odd. They are the world’s largest amphibians – reaching almost two metres in length. They are an ancient lineage of living fossils that split from other amphibians in the Jurassic, 170 million years ago. As sitand-wait predators at the top of the food chain, they are more like crocodiles.
What’s their problem?
They had a wide distribution across China, so it’s been assumed that there must be enough left to sustain the species. Our survey suggests otherwise. We found animals in only four of almost a hundred sites with optimal habitat, and these were likely farm escapees. We’re not confident that we’ve found a single wild salamander in four years. It’s a far worse situation than anyone thought.
What’s causing the decline?
One of their local names means “even the pigs won’t eat them”, but in the last 15 years they’ve been rebranded as a luxury food and a farming industry has taken off. There have been problems breeding them in captivity, so there’s been a demand for wild animals to restock farms.
How do we save them?
We urgently need to assess the farmed population from a point of view of conservation rather than food. There are also a few animals in zoos, and there might still be a few truly wild ones. These could all be used to establish proper conservation breeding programmes. But that’s not straightforward. Our genetic analyses of preserved specimens shows that there are five distinct species, not one, and each seems to be associated with a different river system. Right now, representatives of each species probably still exist in farms. But these will soon get eaten, or sold and hybridised.
Is there any hope?
We must be both optimistic and realistic. The fact that there are so many animals in captivity is a luxury we don’t have for many Critically Endangered species. But we really need a will for change in China if things are to happen quickly.