Endangered
Scott Bar salamander
Plethodon asupak
The Scott Bar salamander is a salamander in the family Plethodontidae, endemic to the United States, where it is restricted to a very small range in the Scott River drainage in Siskiyou County, California, at altitudes between 700 and 1,300 metres (2,300 and 4,300 ft) above sea level.
Appearance
P. Asupak is a moderate-sized, robust salamander with long limbs growing to a snout-to-vent length of 61 mm (2.4 in) for males and 67 mm (2.6 in) for females. It has a broad brown or bronze dorsal stripe and is otherwise purplish-gray with white flecks that condense on the sides and limbs into larger patches. The underparts are dark gray or purplish mottled with paler gray and flecked with white.
Described in 2005, it is one of the most recently described species in the large genus Plethodon.
Range and habitat
A species endemic to California, it inhabits shaded, moss-covered talus slopes in old-growth mixed evergreen and montane fir forests of the Klamath Mountain Range. It was discovered in 2001, and is currently known from a few locations near the confluence of the Klamath and Scott Rivers, hence its common name Scott Bar salamander. Its range is only 20 km (13 mi) at its greatest dimension.
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.
Scott Bar 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 Scott Bar salamander, Wikidata item Q1594616. 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.
