Chinese giant salamander

Where does the Chinese giant salamander live?

Home: Cool, fast rocky streams in the mountains.

In the wild it lives in these countries: China.

Conservation status from the IUCN: critically endangered.

The short profile

Fully grown: often more than 1 m long. It weighs about 25 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

In the cold, fast streams of central China lives the biggest amphibian on Earth. A full-grown Chinese giant salamander is often more than a metre long and weighs around twenty-five kilograms, and the largest ones ever measured were far bigger. Once it is grown it has no gills, so almost all of its oxygen passes straight through the loose folds of skin along its sides, which is why it needs water that is cold and full of oxygen. Its eyes are tiny and it hunts by feel, waiting under a rock until a fish, a crab or a frog brushes past, then opening its wide mouth so fast that the prey is sucked in with the water. In late summer the female lays four to five hundred eggs in a chamber under a boulder, and the male guards them for about two months. Wild numbers have fallen by more than eighty per cent since the 1950s, because the animals were caught for food and their streams were dammed and polluted.

Find it on the globe

Chinese giant salamander is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.