Why are giant salamanders becoming extinct in the wild?

The giant salamander is a commodity, and is farmed, but it is on the verge of extinction in the wild. Wait, don’t you think it’s strange that if it can be farmed and is a commodity, it must have a high yield, so how could it become extinct? Isn’t this a contradiction?

This involves the issue of the species of the giant salamander, and its extinction is due to the wrong protection. Let's talk about it below!

01. What is a giant salamander?

The giant salamander, also known as the baby fish, is distributed almost throughout the country. It is often found in places such as caves and stone holes in deep pools of streams and rivers. Moreover, it has a wide range of diet, including crabs, frogs, fish, shrimps, aquatic insects and their larvae.

However, it quickly became endangered.

So we decided to protect it.

02. How to protect giant salamanders?

How to protect it? The best way is to breed giant salamanders artificially and then release them. This giant salamander is actually quite easy to breed.

After years of technological accumulation, giant salamanders can now be successfully cultivated in artificial bases, and the output is not small.

As a result, the giant salamander has a new industry: as human food. For example, if you search directly on the Internet, you will find many ways to eat giant salamanders.

Well, how do we protect them after they are bred artificially? We release them back into the wild regularly, so that the needs of the wild population can be met.

In fact, this is also a very mature animal protection model in modern times. Our Siberian tigers and giant pandas all follow this idea: they are artificially raised to a certain size and then released into the wild. However, something went wrong at this step. It was this step that led to the near extinction of the giant salamander...

Do you find it strange that since there is no problem with artificial breeding and it can be used as food, what on earth could have caused it to become extinct? Here we have to mention the species of giant salamander.

03. How many species of giant salamanders are there?

We have always thought that the giant salamander is one species. The encyclopedia also says that there are three species in the genus Giant Salamander, the Chinese giant salamander, the Japanese giant salamander and the American giant salamander. If this is true, then there is no problem. After all, the wild and the artificial are the same species, so it doesn't matter.

But is it really so?

In 2018, a team led by Che Jing, a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, collected thousands of Chinese giant salamander samples across the country and then conducted genetic analysis. This analysis revealed that the giant salamanders in China are not a single species at all.

Through their research, they found that there are at least eight species of giant salamanders in China, five in the wild and two in farms...

What does this mean?

There may be many species in the wild, but people thought there was only one, so they only kept one species and released it into the wild. As a result, the released giant salamanders may have caused the extinction of the original giant salamanders in the wild...

Recently, they also discovered a wild purebred population of Jiangxi giant salamander in the Jiulingshan National Nature Reserve in Jiangxi Province. This is also the first purebred population of Chinese giant salamander with clear genetic identity and stable reproduction in the wild in my country.

Now, do you understand why the giant salamander is on the verge of extinction in the wild? In fact, this is also a topic that is easily overlooked in animal protection.