If you’re hiking the parks this time of year on a rainy day, look for salamanders crossing the trails. Oakland County Parks boasts at least eight species of these amazing amphibians. They will range in size and color, including spotted.
Despite their curious appearance, salamanders are slow-moving and harmless to people. It’s a common fisherman’s myth that mudpuppies have a poisonous bite and should be cut free instead of unhooked, but this is not true – just be careful not to damage their gills when handling. Most salamanders live a long time for an animal their size. Spotted salamanders may make their spring migration annually for 20 or 30 years.
Here is a look at some salamanders you will find in the county:
- Every spring on the first warm, rainy night, adult mole salamanders (including spotted, tiger and blue-spotted) leave the safety of their woodland burrows and migrate hundreds of feet or more to the same vernal pool where they hatched. Their eggs are laid in water and hatch into larvae similar to tadpoles. Salamander larvae are the top vernal pool predators, feasting on fairy shrimp and growing fast so they can metamorphose into their air-breathing adult form before the pools dry up in late summer.
- Not all salamanders follow the same life pattern. Mudpuppies are our largest salamander, growing to about a foot long! They’re completely aquatic even as adults, and breathe underwater through large, bushy gills. You might even accidentally catch one ice fishing in several Oakland County Parks – please practice catch and release!
- Our smallest species are the red-backed salamander and four-toed salamander. They have a particularly strange quirk – despite breathing air, they have no lungs! They’ve evolved to get all the oxygen they need by absorbing it directly through their skin.
- Red-backed salamanders have taken land life to the extreme – they lay their eggs under logs and the young go through the larval stage inside the egg, hatching directly into tiny versions of their parents. Four-toeds have adopted an intermediate strategy, laying their eggs on land under moss above vernal pools – the aquatic larvae hatch and drop into the water.
- By far the strangest of Oakland County’s salamanders are the unisexual salamanders. They’re all female and are normally triploid, having three sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two. Bizarrely, they reproduce by cloning themselves or by stealing DNA by mating with males of other salamander species, so they always have characteristics of multiple different species! They’re very common in our parks and can be found migrating alongside their other mole salamander relatives in spring.
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