Salamanders are cool

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adamhovey1988

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They’re like slimy lizards. Let’s talk about them. I saw a mud salamander the other day. It had cute, beady eyes.
 
I saw one under a rock once behind the neighbor’s garage when I was a kid. It was very exciting. It was pinkish and it ran away into the weeds very fast. For years me and the neighbor kid would look around for more, but that was a one-time-only exciting event as we never saw another.
 
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We find them under rocks behind our garage.
I think they’re cute.
 
I live in the woods, so paradoxically, I have to burn wood to prevent fires, and I was going around getting dead wood to throw on the fire, and I found a salamander staring at me. I thought it was a red salamander at first, but I checked, it is in fact a mud salamander. It was so weird, because it started moving backwards very slowly, now a lot of salamanders have poisonous skin, so I don’t think it was too worried, but I was thinking to myself, “if I was a predator this thing would not live”. I love reptiles and amphibians, I actually have a small pond in front of my house, so frogs and toads are a regular site where I live. I will sometimes have conversations with the toads, they’re very one-sided.
 
I love toads. I caught one once at a picnic in college. It wasn’t happy and squirted me with toad juice. I kept it in a container for a couple hours so we could look at it and then let it go in the weeds before we left the picnic grounds.

Another time I found a big box turtle, one of the ones that’s almost a foot across, in the middle of the road near my house when I was on my way to class. I took it home for a few hours and let it crawl on the porch and snap big carrot sticks right in half, then we took it to the woods near where it had been crossing the road and let it go on the creek bank.

As a kid I also got some minnows from a creek and watched them morph into teeny frogs and let them go.

I was really big on animals and nature as a kid and probably missed my calling to be Casey Anderson or something because my parents weren’t really into animals, we lived in a dense suburb and animal jobs didn’t seem to pay much money. I’ve been thinking about taking another bear study course this year as it’s unlikely there’s COVID in the woods.
 
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Haven’t seen salamanders, but have occasionally discovered lizards and little frogs in my flower beds, and we have at least one resident ribbon snake that I sometimes see slithering from one burrow to another, across the foot paths. Diverse wildlife = healthy habitat.

Another reason I am very reluctant to use herbicides or insecticides in my garden. I would prefer to let the abundant bird population take care of the bugs, and I dig the weeds. Of course, I’m always digging …

It’s always a treat to see these little creatures in my flowerbeds. I just leave them alone.
 
I remember when I lived up north, when we went fishing, sometimes we’d catch mudpuppies/waterdogs. Aquatic salamanders are fascinating, too. They are the same thing, just, down here, we say waterdog, up north we say mudpuppies. I used both interchangeably. Ya know, it’s funny, when I try to look for these critters, I can never find them, when I don’t, I do!
 
Talking about hot, do you know salamanders are the symbol of the element of fire?

Bruni, the salamander, in Frozen 2 is the spirit of fire.

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With maybe the exception of newts, they do have very cool skin.
 
I’ve never seen it, but I didn’t like the first one (which I know is an unpopular opinion).
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I love toads.
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One should eat a live toad first thing after getting up each morning.

You are guaranteed that nothing worse will happen to you that day!

:crazy_face: 🤮
Tis_Bearself said:
Another time I found a big box turtle, one of the ones that’s almost a foot across,
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We found one of those big ones in our back yard, the size of a dinner plate.

The thing is, we had solid wood fences on each side, chain link into the ground in the back, and no more than an inch or two under the gate into the back yard, again with solid wood.

We fed it lettuce, and then took it to a game preserve.
 
I have to admit I put the big turt on its back a couple times just for the fun of seeing how it used its apparently incredibly strong neck to flip itself over.
 
Back in the 1980s when I worked in a pet store, we used to sell and keep axolotls.

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Once during those pet store years, a group of us drove from L.A. to Needles on the Colorado River, 280 miles one way and over eight hours round trip through the desert, just to get some waterdogs from a bait store, which we kept in aquariums.
 
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I’d rather y’all keep them in aquariums than use them for bait. If you look at a map of their range, it says they don’t live here. It also says alligators don’t, but I know better. Heck, I’m looking at a map of Illinois right now, and I know dang well mudpuppies live in Henry County, I used to live in Illinois, in Henry County, as a matter of fact. That is something that is fascinating to me about nature. Sometimes, anecdotal experience can be more accurate than the latest scientific studies. By the way, I was actually reading yesterday, and just barely in my area is the Webster’s salamander. And if the distribution maps of it are correct, it has a heavily fragmented population, which makes me wonder what its historical range has been.
 
I was reading about them yesterday, here in the US, we have some cave salamanders. The Georgia blind salamander is similar in a lot of aspects.
 
I checked to see how does it looks like, they are pretty simmilar.
lives an animal that’s a cross between Peter Pan and Gollum.
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I would never imagine olm with this describing.
 
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