Critically Endangered
Oligosoma salmo
Oligosoma salmo
Oligosoma salmo is a skink in the family Scincidae, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to New Zealand.
Appearance
O. Salmo is similar to the speckled skink (O. Infrapunctatum), but with a more slender build, glossier, and with its distinctive patterning underneath the tail. Kapitia skinks are up to 85 mm from snout to vent (usually < 75 mm, typically 65–75 mm) with a tail longer than the body. Their back is brown with light and dark flecks and no mid-dorsal stripe. Their underside is yellow and unmarked, with a pinkish tinge around the throat.
Range and habitat
O. Salmo are currently found a small strip of coastal vegetation approximately 1 km long and only 5 m wide. Since their discovery in the 1990s, their pasture habitat has been converted into dairy farms, and they only occur in highly modified non-native vegetation between dairy paddocks and beachfront sand dunes, sheltering under debris (such as discarded corrugated iron), driftwood, shrubs, and rough pasture grass. This suggests that O. Salmo is adapted to climbing trees, and that its current habitat is what remained when the coastal forest behind the beach was cleared for farming.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Following the partial destruction of its remaining habitat in 2018 by a cyclone, a small captive breeding population was established at Auckland Zoo.
In crisis
There are fewer than 200 individuals remaining in the wild. A further survey in November 2015 caught 52 skinks, among them 24 not previously recorded, and the total population size was estimated at 40–50. With approximately 200 individuals in the wild, the NZ TCS threat status for O. Salmo has since 2009 been "Threatened–Nationally Critical".
Fearing the effects of a subsequent cyclone, DOC rangers collected 50 individuals and with 24 hours' notice transported them to a captive breeding programme at Auckland Zoo's New Zealand Centre for Conservation Medicine (NZCCM) – a rescue procedure that had already been successfully followed with cobble skinks (Oligosoma robinsoni). In 2019, the population was estimated at 150–200.
Oligosoma salmo is Critically 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 Oligosoma salmo, Wikidata item Q88635390. 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.
