The Ugly Animals: We Can't All Be Pandas by Simon Watt

Author:Simon Watt
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750960847
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2014-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

‘… armed with chemical weaponry …’

PART SALAMANDER, PART sausage, this frankfurter-like amphibian is known as an olm. It lives in the cavernous pits below the ground of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hertzegovina, making it the only vertebrate in Europe that is adapted to spending all of its life in caves.

The olm is a member of the Proteidae, an ancient family of salamanders that consists of only six species and generally known as mudpuppies and waterdogs. Their lineage diverged from their closest relatives some 190 million years ago. While most salamander life cycles go through an aquatic larval period before metamorphosing into adults, all members of the Proteidae petulantly refuse to grow up: they retain their gills, which look like flamboyant, pink feather boas, throughout their lives. The olm’s eyes are laughable and most don’t even bother growing eyelids: in fact, one subspecies even wears a permanent layer of skin over them. In the larval form their eyes are normal, but then, as though the olm suddenly remembers that it lives in total darkness, the eyes diminish and start to regress, disappearing almost totally after about four months. Being unable to see and living in an environment where sight is useless, they rely on other senses: the best sense of smell of any amphibian; hearing adapted and specialised to work underwater; a compass-like awareness of magnetic fields to help navigate in the inky blackness of their home; and the ability to detect weak electric fields, allowing them to feel the presence of a nearby prey’s nervous system. Armed with these senses, the olm hunts and feeds upon crabs, snails, insects and other small cave invertebrates. If food is scarce, though, they can survive without eating for up to ten years. They do this by sheer laziness, lowering their metabolism and, when particularly desperate, can even reabsorb their own body tissues. They are a long-lived species and, in captivity, have been observed living to over 58 years old, though some evidence suggests that they can survive for up to 100 years. In most cases, their skin has a pasty white or pinkish hue and, as they are mostly transparent, the sexes can be easily distinguished by examining their brashly displayed internal organs. In 1986 a dark-skinned subspecies, known as the black olm, sporting normal eyes, was discovered in Slovenia and scientists now believe that the olm might be a complex of several subspecies.

The olm is considered vulnerable. Its numbers are declining due to over-collection from the wild, the introduction of invasive species and from the pollution of the waters in which it lives.

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