A Chinese giant salamander from Guangxi ProvinceROBERT MURPHYThe six-feet-long Chinese giant salamander, the world’s largest amphibian, has fallen victim to faulty conservation measures and poaching. Research from two studies, published today (May 21) in Current Biology, have found that the salamander is five or more distinct species, all headed to extinction.
“After surveying 97 sites, we found salamanders in only four localities,” Andrew Cunningham, a conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London and coauthor of one of the studies, tells Wired. The salamander was already featured as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and has apparently almost vanished from its freshwater home in China, Cunningham and his colleagues report.
Previous studies had hinted at the Chinese giant salamander’s underlying diversity. In the second report out today, Cunningham and an overlapping group of researchers genetically analyzed more than 1,000 tissue samples from wild-caught and farm-bred salamanders, discovering five or more species.
According to The Atlantic, the salamanders’ reluctance to travel means the five species have evolved independently over millions of years and ...
