Archives of The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 32, Number 11;   November, 2005

Discovery of American Salamander in Korea Tells 100 Million-Year-Old Tale

by Robert Sanders

Berkeley, CA -- Imagine discovering pandas in California or kangaroos in Argentina. For David Wake, one of the world's leading experts on amphibians and a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, an equivalent surprise was the recent discovery in Korea of a type of salamander that comprises the majority of species in the world but is totally unknown in Asia and rare outside the Americas. "I've discovered and named nearly 50 species of salamanders - more than 10 percent of the total in the world. I've discovered new genera in Guatemala and Cost Rica. But this tops everything I've ever found by a long ways," Wake said. "For me, this is the most stunning discovery in the field of herpetology during my lifetime. It's so utterly unexpected, so completely unexpected."

The discovery of a lungless salamander from the family Plethodontidae was made two years ago by Stephen J. Karsen, a biologist from Illinois who teaches in the Taejon Christian International School in Chungcheongnamdo province midway down the western edge of the Korean peninsula. Wake, the world's top expert on lungless salamanders, and colleagues in South Korea and Illinois report the discovery and their analysis of the new species, which they named Karsenia koreana, in the May 5 issue of Nature.

The find suggests that the lungless salamanders are more widespread than people thought and some 60 to 100 million years ago may have had a worldwide range from the Americas through Europe and Asia. Since then, as the world's climate cooled, salamanders in the Americas flourished while those elsewhere somehow suffered extinction.

"It's really huge," said Robert Kaplan, a professor of biology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and an expert on Korean frogs and salamanders, who heard about the find a few weeks ago. "The closest relative to the critter they are reporting for the first time is probably here in the Pacific Northwest. So, you have a major biogeographical question: How in the world could it have gotten there? Previously unknown but still living vertebrate species like this can provide us with key information on the history of life on earth."

Karsen made the discovery in April 2003 while looking for salamanders in a wooded Korean upland as he would in his native Illinois - by turning over rocks. The plethodontids were probably overlooked, Wake said, because the newly discovered salamanders are fully terrestrial, whereas all other Asian salamanders breed in water. Korean biologists, though actively studying other salamanders and finding other new species, did not expect to find a family of salamanders never before seen in Asia. "People have gone on expeditions looking for terrestrial salamanders in places like Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics," said Wake. "They didn't bother with northern China or Korea or Japan because we thought we knew everything that was there. And so here (in Korea) they show up, and in the most surprising way, when some guy who's a high school teacher from Illinois goes out with his class and says, 'Let's look for salamanders, let's see what we can find when we turn over rocks and logs.'"

To date, the salamander has been found in 16 locations in three Korean provinces, and Wake and. his colleagues have established that it differs significantly from all other lungless salamanders, which make up 70 percent of the known 535 salamander species in the world. Wake and his colleagues placed the species in a new genus of plethodontids, Karsenia. The animal's common name will be the Korean crevice salamander, for its preferred abode, limestone crevices.