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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
The various kinds of salamanders, worldwide, have different life cycles.
Examples of those lifestyles are represented in southeastern Pennsylvania by local species of salamanders, including spotted and red salamanders, eastern newts, and slimy salamanders. They are some of the larger, more colorful and common of those amphibians in this area.
Being related, salamanders are constantly moist, small, attractive, cold-blooded, and hidden away, making them difficult to experience. Most have four legs, and all have tails. And all salamanders, young and adults, consume invertebrates.
Spotted salamanders and red salamanders start life in water as eggs that hatch into aquatic larvae, which have external gills and swimming tails. As they develop, they grow lungs, crawl out of their watery nurseries, and shelter under moist, dead-leaf carpets on forest floors.
As adults, these common salamanders are 6 inches long, stout, and attractive. Spotted salamanders are black with two rows of yellow or orange spots down their backs and tails. And red salamanders are red with many tiny black dots all over.
During heavy or prolonged rains sometime in March each year, many mature male and female spotted salamanders trudge over lingering snow and dead leaves on forest floors to spawn in pools in those woods.
Each female deposits scores of eggs in a milky-white blob on the bottom of a puddle. A male fertilizes those eggs. After spawning, spotted salamanders retreat to damp coverings of fallen foliage on forest floors for the rest of the year.
Each female red salamander attaches her up to 70 eggs under rocks in woodland springs and running brooks. She then protects those eggs until they hatch.
Eastern newts start life in water with gills but emerge from their aquatic cradles as red efts that are red and have lungs. Efts live on moist woodland floors for a few years but return to the ponds where they hatched.
There they become olive-green on top, with two rows of red dots and yellow below. And there they live out their lives as newts, feeding and spawning.
The striking red efts may have returned to water to be adult newts long ago because they couldn’t compete with other adult salamanders on land for shelter and food. Efts that returned to water, where few adult salamanders dwell, were the only newts that survived to this day.
Slimy salamanders live entirely on woodland floors, under rocks, fallen logs, and dead-leaf coverings. As a species, they can roam far from water because they are not tied to it to spawn.
They have no aquatic stage in their life cycle and no lungs. They breathe through their moist skins.
Slimy salamanders are black and silver and slimy for their protection against predators.
Females of this common species lay egg clusters in their moist, dark homes on woodland floors. The young hatch as miniatures of their parents.
These salamanders represent some of the interesting ways their kind lives.
Clyde McMillan-Gamber is a retired Lancaster County Parks naturalist.