Green Salamander

In the field

Shine a light into a narrow crack in a shaded cliff and what looks like a scrap of green lichen may look back. The green salamander is three to five inches long, black or dark brown with irregular patches of green or yellow-green, pale underneath, and flat enough in the head and body to slide deep into rock. Its toes end in square pads. It lives in cool, humid, shaded forest on cliffs, outcrops and boulders, usually away from running water, in sandstone, limestone, granite or quartzite. The Virginia Herpetological Society’s account says crevice size and dampness seem to matter more than the kind of rock.

Older writers also found it under the bark of fallen logs, and in Kentucky in the 1930s large numbers turned up under the bark of dead chestnuts. Wilson gathered Blue Ridge records of it in trees and woody debris in 2003 and suggested that losing the chestnut and the big old logs had something to do with how scarce it now is.

Breeding happens out of the water. The female fixes a cluster of ten to thirty eggs to the roof of a crevice and stays with it through two to three months of incubation and for about a month after hatching. The young come out as small salamanders with no larval stage, and females breed only every other year. Collecting for the pet trade and for study is a recorded threat, which is reason enough to leave the crevices alone.

The Blue Ridge population

The main range follows the Cumberland Plateau and neighbouring uplands from Pennsylvania down to northern Alabama and Mississippi, and Tennessee’s 2015 Wildlife Action Plan names it a priority in the South Cumberland. A separate population lives on the Blue Ridge Escarpment where North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia meet. Jeffrey Corser followed seven of its historical populations through the 1990s and found relative abundance down 98 percent from 1970. The collapse began in the mid to late 1970s, and three populations first found in 1991 crashed in 1996 and 1997. Corser proposed an unidentified new cause of death, working along with habitat loss, collecting, disease and climate. North Carolina’s wildlife commission dates the sharp drop to the 1980s, links it at least partly to acid rain, and reports gradual recovery at several sites. Resurveys summarised by Southeast PARC in 2021 found salamanders at 44 of 57 historical sites in North Carolina, many with far fewer animals, and at 23 of 51 in South Carolina.

For Georgia, Charles Wharton’s 1978 state survey, published by the Georgia Geologic Survey, records it in quartzite crevices in the northeastern mountains, and Leslie Edwards of the Georgia Botanical Society lists it among the rare species of a northeast Georgia gorge. A reported population on Mount LeConte in the Smokies is regarded as doubtful.

In 2019 genetic work split off the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, Aneides caryaensis, known from four North Carolina counties. Writing from before 2019 doesn’t separate the two.