Salamandra atra
A small, glossy black salamander without a single yellow spot. It lives in damp forests and stony pastures of the Alps and comes out mostly when it rains. Adapted to the cold, it lays no eggs in water: the female gives birth to fully formed young after a gestation of two to four years.
The storm has just broken over the forest track. Between the wet stones, glossy black salamanders plod slowly along. Let the weather turn dry and windy, and not a single one will be found.
According to info fauna, the adult measures between 9 and 13 cm, the female up to 15 cm. It is uniformly black, belly included, without the slightest spot, and its smooth skin gleams as if wet. Ring-shaped grooves mark the body and the tail, which is round, not flattened. Its parotoids, two kidney-shaped glands, are large, its eyes big and bulging. Only a slightly more swollen cloaca gives the male away.
In Switzerland, most sightings are between 800 and 2000 m. It frequents damp forests, especially broadleaved or mixed ones, fairly cool high pastures, scree and the banks of streams, preferably on limestone ground. Present from the Vaud Alps to the Säntis, it is absent from the left bank of the Rhône, and the dry valleys at the heart of the Alps, Valais or the Engadine, hold almost none.
It lives hidden under a stone or a stump or in a rock crevice, and comes out during heavy thunderstorm rain or at dawn, when dew moistens the ground. Active from May at low altitude, later in the mountains, it withdraws from September onwards. Out of some fifty eggs, usually only two develop: the larvae swallow the others in the uterus, then feed on cells supplied by its wall. Gestation lasts two years at around 1000 m, three up to 2000 m, four above that. The young are born fully formed, 4.5 to 5 cm long: there is no need for open water, which is just as well, since it swims very badly.
Not threatened according to info fauna, it is protected under the Ordinance on the Protection of Nature and Cultural Heritage. Being so discreet, though, it often escapes observers, and its numbers are hard to estimate. Roads kill it in places. On the alpine pastures, the growing number of sheep deprives it of its refuges, and the effect of acid rain and fog on forest soils remains to be clarified. To protect it, it is best to keep its forests and alpine meadows as they are.
Sources: info fauna (karch), species account and portrait.
