Fire salamander

Where does the fire salamander live?

Home: Damp deciduous forests with cool streams across Europe.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Greece, Romania.

Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.

The short profile

Fully grown: 14–20 cm long. It weighs about 0 035 kilograms. On the menu: insects.

The story behind it

A fire salamander spends most of its life hidden under logs, stones and leaves, and comes out when the forest floor is soaked with rain. In German it is nicknamed the rain man, because a warm, wet evening is the best time to spot one crossing a path. The yellow pattern is not decoration but a signal: glands in the skin hold a bitter, burning substance called samandarin, so almost nothing tries to eat a second one. No two salamanders wear the same pattern, and researchers photograph their backs to tell individuals apart, the way we use fingerprints. The female does not lay eggs; she carries them inside her for about ten months and then releases thirty to fifty finger-length larvae into cool, clean running water, where they breathe through feathery gills until their legs grow strong. The old name comes from firewood: salamanders liked to hide in damp logs, and when the logs were carried indoors and put on the hearth, the animals crawled out, and people believed they were born from the flames.

Find it on the globe

Fire 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.