Endangered
Santa Cruz black salamander
Aneides niger
Santa Cruz black salamander is a salamander in the family Plethodontidae (order Caudata) — Aneides niger, recorded as Endangered and tied to United States.
Appearance
Unlike all other members of the Aneides flavipunctatus complex, adult individuals of this species have an almost uniformly black coloration. Juveniles have numerous tiny white spots, as with other members of the complex, that are progressively lost as the individual matures.
Range and habitat
It is restricted to the San Francisco Peninsula of California, where it inhabits San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and western Santa Clara counties. It is endemic to the U.S. State of California.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Salamanders hide under logs, in seeps, or in caves. They do not commute across a dry valley.
Eggs and damp skin make amphibians quick to vanish from a drained wetland or a forest stripped of litter.
In crisis
Salamanders disappear when seeps are capped, caves are disturbed, or a pathogen moves through a mountain range.
Santa Cruz black salamander is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Santa Cruz black salamander, Wikidata item Q2849204. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
