Classical S.s.terrestris

A picture from classical Sst from the Taunus mountains near Frankfurt:



Uwe

Great pic Uwe. Did you find them like this or did you set them up for a picture?

Hi Jeff,

I found them like that. It is a population with high density. I was just there again today an saw even more animals on a spot. It is easy to find >100/1h if go the right time and weather like today.

Uwe

Wow, that's really awesome Uwe. Stop describing, you're making me jealous!

Just come over for a stay in Europe, in March/April or October as these are good periods to watch as many as you want...!

AGHHHH! Both of you are driving me crazy!

You are very very very lucky people!!! You just "find" salamanders in the backyard!!! Here in Brasil we dont have wild salamanders! If we want to even see one we have to search very hardly in the stores and we only find the commom species in the pet shops.... There you have lots of them in a very big diversity of races!!

Hey living in Brazil you must not complain. You find many many species of frogs, toads, snakes, lizards, turtles and even alligators. Biodiversity hot spot!
In the Netherlands we just have 7 reptiles, 4 lizards and 3 snakes...and 4 newts and 1 salamander...and we have to drive sometimes hours to get to see them ;-)

Brazil has Bolitoglossa

britain has even less! 1 frog, 2 toads, 3 snakes, 3 lizards and 3 newts

Wow! Yes....thinking about other hepertiles, Brasil is realy full of them! But if the question is salamanders and newts, its really hard to find different species in the stores.... I don't forgot Bolitoglossa, but this specie live in the other side of the country, in the deeps of the amazonic forest!! They are rare i think... I didn't know that you had so few hepertiles!!!

Hi Jeff,

just an other example from this habitat from last week.



Uwe

[justin slate]

That is very impressive. Thank you for posting these pictures for those of us outside their natural range.
j

By the way,

the wall you see is the daytime habitat.

Uwe

[Mike East]

Hi Uwe,

These photos and your other photos of habitat and larvae in the other thread were great to see. Have you been able to observe Salamandra breeding in the wild? From your descriptions of the high numbers of animals you see, I imagine the breeding sites must be full of adults!

Thanks,
Mike

In response to Will, Britain has 2 native species of frog, the common and the pool frog (R. lessonae.)
Adam

Hi Mike,

breeding in Salamandra is different from the newts. They mate on land and the female deposits larvae at several times of the year.

So they don´t congregate on the breeding sites.

uwe

Adam- i do know about the pool frog, but i thought they were still debating about it (for those not i the know the rana lessonae was thought to be an introduced species, but they found bone deposits from the area so the species is thought to be a native now).

mind you if i were the pedantic type i'd say we have 3 species as rana dalmatina is a native of jersey

I thought that Rana esculenta had also been added to the list due to how long the colony had been established.

I also thought we now had 4 newts with the established colonies of Alpine newts in Scotland being counted. The alpines are certainly listed in one of my books on amphibians in the united kingdom.

our lists were of native species, if were were to go into introduced species then you'd add
M. alpestris
T. carnifex
H. arborea
R. esculenta
R. ridibunda
A. obstetricans

And Xenopus laevis!