And salamanders, a kind of nocturnal amphibian, are the unequivocal stars.
There’s a secret wildlife wonderland hidden in the US — and it’s in danger
Countless rare animals lurk under the logs in the Appalachian Mountains.
These mountains have a greater concentration of salamanders than any other place on the planet. In some forests, you can find well over 10,000 individuals of just one species in a chunk of land no larger than a football field. At least 100 salamander species live in Appalachia, earning it the title of “salamander capital of the world.”
The Appalachian Mountains have had a complex and tumultuous history. A disregard for the value of ecosystems and the communities they support seeded decades of environmental destruction throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Companies cleared millions of trees and exploded the tops of mountains to feed the nation’s insatiable appetite for timber and coal.
Remarkably, salamanders, on the whole, have so far survived these threats. Although they may look fragile, they have adaptations forged by millions of years of evolution. This mountain range, and its iconic trail, remains a salamander mecca.
But today, a new suite of threats looms, and they’re poised to overcome even the most clever adaptations to life in Appalachia.
In 2010, Maerz and a handful of other researchers published a study on the impact of various climate scenarios on Appalachian salamanders. The results were frightening: “All model scenarios predict significant declines in species richness across the southern portion of the Appalachian Highlands with the loss of all current species from some areas,” the authors wrote.