A Splash of Rain

 

Photo Jane Robinson

All it took was a just a splash of rain, and the life that been patiently waiting hidden underground or in some secluded crevice burrowed the way up to the surface as night fell. The first to appear was a Fire Salamander  (Fr. Salamandre tachetée), slowly waddling across the terrace, an impressive archaic  looking beast with its bright yellow spots and stripes on the shiny black background skin. The European Fire salamanders are quite big, up to 25 centimetres, and they are known for their longevity; one lived for more than 50 years in a natural history museum in Germany. 

A Fire Salamander

The brightness of the skin colouring is deliberate; a warning to potential predators that it is not good to eat, an advertisement  of  the toxic glands situated around the head and the skin of the back. I was not going to touch it, they are quite capable of shedding their tails and limbs as a defence mechanism and then growing them back nearly perfectly, a process called regeneration. It has been only relatively recently that the mechanisms of how this works have been understood, and is no doubt being studied to see if the ability could somehow be transferred to human beings. Infant humans can do this to a limited extent, but adults cannot. 

They are very interesting animals indeed, and have at least two characteristics that  are very strange indeed.

 

They are amphibians, and in the southern part of their range give birth to tadpoles, depositing them directly in water, where they will breathe through gills until they have changed into the legged adult form when they will crawl out and live happily on land. However in the northern part of Europe there are just a few that keep the developing young inside their bodies until they too are deposited in water but immediately crawl out to mainly spend their lives amongst the leaf litter. Being cold blooded and moist, it is important that they do not dry out by being exposed to hot sun, and so are often seen after dark.

Their reproductive behaviour is peculiar, to say the least. The male deposits a blob of sperm on the ground, and then having located a female, crawls underneath her and heaves her onto his back. He then transports her back to where he has deposited his sperm, then tips over so that her vent is located directly over it, and is drawn up into her body.

The myth that they are so cold that they can resist fire is nothing more than a myth, but historically they have always been associated with fire, an association possibly originating from their habit of hibernating in wooden logs, and then emerging - obviously - when the log was put onto a fire.

Eating slugs and snails and no doubt other larvae they come across, our damp deciduous woodland sloping down to the stream is ideal habitat for this strange animal. 

Next night we were serenaded by at least 3 three Midwife toads (Fr. Crapaud ou Alyte accoucheur). These lovely little toads wake up from their hibernation and the males start to call, a repeated single note at the same pitch, and I always enjoy walking out in the dark and hearing the slightly different calls coming from different directions. This is a call that can be confused with the Scops Owl (Fr. Petit duc scops)). It is possible, with careful listening, to hear the difference in the calls, the Scops owl’s being slightly longer and more whistled.

The following night it was obvious that at least one of the ‘singing’ male toads had successfully charmed with his singing and found himself a female.  He has mounted on her much larger back and is grasping her under the front ‘arm’ pits. Here he will hang on, if possible, until she lays a string of eggs (Fr. bracelet), which he will then fertilise. To stimulate her to lay he will give the female a rapid massage with his feet and at the same time compress her flanks. Amphibian foreplay.

Male and Female Midwife toad

He then wraps the eggs around his back legs (thus the name) and will carry them, going down every evening to a water point to keep them moist, for a length of time that can vary from 3 to 8 weeks, until they are ready to hatch into tadpoles and drop off in the water . He might, in a good year, be carrying the eggs of up to three females, up to 150 eggs. Below is a photograph I took in a previous year showing the male emerging in the evening with his precious cargo wrapped around his hind legs, on his way down to the stream to bathe them. In France they are considered vulnerable, and are a fully protected species.

 

Male carrying a string of eggs