Salamanders and newts seem so fragile. It's amazing to me that they are as successful as they are. Did you ever run across any of the salamanders that got stuck with their gills, due to iodine problems? There was a county lake near where I grew up full of "water dogs", the mature tiger salamanders that never metamorphose (Ambystoma tigrinum).
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Not in Louisiana. In North Dakota, Tiger Salamanders also sometimes stay paedomorphs. My undergraduate advisor took a really cool underwater video during the winter. After all this madness ends, I'll have to make a post about it, but for now, here's the link:
Holy smokes - look at all of them! They can be so thick in a lake! That county lake in Kansas was thick with them, too. The lake was surrounded by a beef packing plant, a municipal dump, and a wastewater treatment plant. That water chemistry was so messed up! Those neotenic salamanders were the only thing that could live there. The locals thought the "water dogs" were the cause of the problem, killing all the bass that they wanted to be in that lake. Doh. I wonder what the story is for the lake in the video! I'll look forward to your post, for sure!