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Giant salamander |
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The hellbender and Asian giant salamanders (family Cryptobranchidae) are aquatic amphibians found in brooks and ponds in the eastern United States, China, and Japan. They are the largest living amphibians known today. The Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), for example, reaches up to 1.44 metres (4.7 ft), feeds on fish, and crustaceans - and has been known to live for more than 50 years in captivity.1 The Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus) can reach a length of 1.8 metres (5.9 ft).2
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The family name is from the Ancient Greek kryptos ("hidden"), and branch ("lung"). This is a reference to how the members absorb oxygen—through capillaries of its side-frills.
Cryptobranchids are large, corpulent, salamanders, with large folds of skin along their flanks. These help increase the animal's surface area, allowing them to absorb more oxygen from the water. They have four toes on the forelimbs, and five on the hind limbs. Their metamorphosis from the larval stage is incomplete, so that the adults retain gill slits (although they also have lungs), and lack eyelids.3
They hunt mainly at night, and as they have poor eyesight, using sensory nodes on their head and body to detect minute changes in water pressure, allowing them to detect their prey.
During mating season, these salamanders will travel upstream, where the female lays two strings of over two hundred eggs each. The male fertilises the eggs externally by releasing his sperm onto them, and will then guard them for at least three months, until they hatch.3 At this point, the larvae will live off their noticeable stored fat until ready to hunt. Once ready they will hunt as a group rather than individually.
Scientists at Asa Zoo in Japan have recently discovered that the male salamander will spawn with more than one female in his den. On occasion the male "den master" will also allow a second male into the den; the reason for this is unclear.
they are old ]] of the former.4
Andrias scheuchzeri plays a main role in Karel Čapek's book War with the Newts.
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