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Wednesday October 13, 2004

Mount Lyell Salamander

In the Habitats column by Gordy Slack, in the Fall 2002 edition of the California Wild magazine, there is mention of the Mt. Lyell salamander. This salamander is one of the most extreme and pecular amphibians on the face of the Earth. What caught my eye was:

It has the longest and fastest tongue of any salamander, uses its tail like a fifth leg and lives above the snowline of the Sierra Nevada.

I then proceeded to read the rest of the article in the hope that it would tell me how long and how fast that tongue was. Pictures of the tongue in action would have been good too, but nope. Nothing doing. Very frustrating. Some googling around soon solved this though.

This site goes into great detail on how the salamander uses it's tongue, which extends almost 6 centimeters ( a little over 2 inches), approximately 80 percent of the salamander's head and body length. They flick the tongue out in about a hundredth of a second.

These salamanders have a remarkable protraction system that heaves the tongue out of the mouth and jerks it back in so fast you don't see the tongue at all -- you just see the fly disappear.

Here's another web site that has some great photos of this critter and the habitat that it lives in.

So to paraphrase Mulder, the answers are out there. You just need to know where to look. I'm still looking for a slow motion film of the tongue snagging a fly though.

[Technorati Tag: Animals]