Red-cheeked Salamander

The animal

A slate-gray to blue-black salamander three and a half to five inches long, without a mark on it except a wash of red on each cheek. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, whose account carries most of what follows, finds it under moss, stones, logs and loose bark in cool, wet forest above about 2,500 feet, and above all in the spruce and fir of the high Smokies. It eats small invertebrates, spiders and beetles and snails among them. Little is known of how it breeds. It is thought to lay its eggs on land in hollows underground, the female probably stays with them, and the young hatch as small copies of the adults, with no larval stage in the water.

A range of one park

The agency’s statement of range is short: the species is found only within the boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That is a single source, and other accounts read differently. The Animal Diversity Web entry, written in 2008, gives Plethodon jordani a range from southwestern Virginia to the far northeast of Georgia. The agency itself places the red-cheeked salamander in a complex with the northern gray-cheeked and red-legged salamanders and says the three often hybridize. The two accounts may simply be drawing the species differently.

The salamander park

The Park Service has called the Smokies the salamander capital of the world, a title with no stated measure behind it, on a count of thirty salamander species, twenty-four of them lungless. The All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory now lists forty-five amphibians in the park. The high forest where the red-cheeked salamander is most at home is the forest the balsam woolly adelgid has thinned. The Park Service puts the loss of Fraser fir in the park at ninety percent. Whether the salamander has lost ground along with the fir is not on record.