Overview
The Frosted Flatwoods Salamander (Ambystoma cingulatum) is an endangered, burrowing mole salamander endemic to the critically imperiled longleaf pine flatwoods of the southeastern United States. Named for the delicate, silvery-grey netlike or ‘frosted’ pattern etched across its slate-black body, it is a flagship species for the conservation of ancient fire-dependent coastal plain savannas.
Biology and Physical Characteristics
The Frosted Flatwoods Salamander has a slender, cylindrical body, a small head, and a flattened, muscular tail. Its dorsal coloration is dark chocolate-brown to jet-black, overlaid with an intricate lattice of silver, pale grey, or icy-white lichen-like speckles and crossbands that resemble a frosty winter pane of glass. Its smooth skin possesses skin glands that secrete defensive unpalatable peptides.
Behavior and Ecology
A fossorial creature, the Frosted Flatwoods Salamander spends the dry spring and summer months deep underground in crayfish burrows, root channels, or beneath rotting pine root systems. In late autumn, triggered by torrential cold rains, adults migrate aboveground to the dry, grassy fringes of seasonal depression ponds, laying clutches of eggs in herbaceous vegetation weeks before winter rains fill the basins.
Conservation and Human Impact
Listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN and Federally Threatened under the US Endangered Species Act, the Frosted Flatwoods Salamander has lost over 90% of its historical habitat. The widespread destruction of old-growth longleaf pine forests for commercial timber and fire suppression that allows dense woody shrubs to choke herbaceous breeding ponds are the primary drivers of its catastrophic decline.
Interesting Factoid
The Frosted Flatwoods Salamander is an ecological optimist: females lay their eggs on dry land in dry grassy wetland depressions, betting everything that winter rains will flood the grasses and hatch their larvae before the eggs dry out.