Four-toed Salamander Hemidactylium scutatum By: Jeremy Scientific Classification Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Lissamphibia Order: Caudata Family: Plethodontidae Genus: Hemidactylium Species: scutatum

Natural History

The four-toed salamander is an amphibian. The four-toed salamander is a vertebrate . A vertebrate is an animal with a backbone. People sometimes mistake amphibians for reptiles. Amphibians have been around for an estimated 350 million years. Scientists believe that amphibians evolved from the lobe-finned fish. Did you know that there are 2500 different species of amphibians?

There are also three different types of amphibians. They are frogs and toads, salamanders, and caecilians, which are lungless wormlike amphibians.

Some people think that amphibians have gills but they don’t have them except when they are in their larval stage.

Salamanders are different from frogs and toads. Frogs and toads lay their eggs in the water while salamanders lay their eggs on land, but the egg must always be moist. Frogs and toads fertilize the eggs when they are laid and salamander eggs are fertilized in the female's body.

Habitat

A habitat is an area were an organism lives. The four-toed salamander needs a suitable habitat that has to be wetlands within or next to mature forests. They would rather live next to forests. Four-toed salamanders like to live around vernal (spring) pools, ponds, bogs, shallow marshes, and other fishless bodies of water. They also like wooded wetlands such as seepage swamps or cedar swamps.

Present Status

The four-toed salamander is on the State of Maine’s Species of Concern list.

Physical Description

The four-toed salamander is a vertebrate and that means that it is in the phylum Chordata. It is also a cold-blooded animal. The four-toed salamander is a small, lungless amphibian that is only 5 to 10 cm. long. It’s a rusty brown or a gray-brown color. Sometimes it can be found with specks of black and bluish spots. The tail of the salamander takes up 57% of its body.

When larvae, four-toed salamanders are about 11 to 15 mm. They are usually born with toes or toe-stubs. Larval four-toed salamanders are aquatic (live in the water) and are a yellowish-brown color. When four-toed salamanders hatch they look like adult salamanders, but they have shorter tails.

Diet and Feeding Habits

If someone asked you whether the four-toed salamander was an herbivore, carnivore, or an omnivore, what would you say? The four-toed salamander is actually an insectivore. That means it only eats insects. The four-toed salamander affects the food chain by eating enough insects so that they don’t take over the world.

Scientist believe that the four-toed salamander only eats insects because that is what can fit in their mouths. They are so small they can only eat small insects. The four-toed salamander eats arthropods and insect larvae, beetles, flies, ants, bristle tails (wingless insects) such as spiders, worms and snails.

Causes of Endangerment

Some of the reasons why the four-toed salamander is a species of concern is because people build many roads and buildings in areas that four-toed salamanders live and so the salamanders die. Pollution gets into the water that the salamanders live in, and if there was a pond and they built a bridge over the pond then it would split the breeding population in half.

Then if people built shopping malls and residential houses over the pond then that would break up the breeding population even more. So if the four-toed salamander died out insects would become overpopulated.

Personal Essay

What is the value to wilderness to modern society?

Standing up on lifted, folded rock
looking out and down

The creek falls to a far valley.
hills beyond that
facing half-forest, dry
clear sky
strong wind in the
stiff glittering needle clusters
of pine their brown
round trunk bodies
straight, still;
rustling trembling limbs and twigs

listen.

This living flowing land
is all there is, forever

We are it
it sings through us

We could live on this Earth
without clothes or tools!

Why would anyone hurt a such a small animal? I think the reason that we might hurt them is because, for example, since the four-toed salamander is about the size of your thumb, someone might accidentally step on it. Also another reason that the four-toed salamander is on Maine’s Species of Concern list is because people destroy their habitat by making residential areas, malls, or roads over their habitat.

The Endangered Species Act can help these animals from being extinct. Here are some of the things that if we didn’t have wilderness we wouldn’t have:  we wouldn't be able to breathe air, we wouldn’t have houses and all of the stuff that we rely on.

Bibliography

1. “Salamander.” World Book 2001. 2001.

2. Amphibians. London: Durling Kindersley Limited. 1991.

3. Hemidactylium scutatum. October 17, 2002. http://animaldiversity.ummz.
umich.edu/accounts/hemidactylium/h._scutatum$narrative.html. (April 4,2003)

4. Salamander History. October 6, 2000. http://www.twingroves.district96.k
12.il.us/Wetlands/Salamander/SalHistory.html. (March 31, 2003)

5. Chalmers, Rebecca. e-mail correspondence. March 28, 2003.

6. deMaynadier, Phillip. e-mail correspondence. March 26, 2003.