The Spectacled Salamander

Finding reverence for Europe's remaining core fauna

Salamandrina perspicillata performing a quality unken reflex

My journey begins with the story of Salamandrina perspicillata, the creature my son and I found in the river that day in April 2020, the inspiration for Endemica, and the one for which I still hold the most reverence.

I should underline early on that I’m not a biologist by training, actually an art historian, but a keen amateur naturalist with a thirst for knowledge who leans heavily on the professional work of others to inform my own observations. In this case, I will single out the writing of Prof. Tim Flannery and his wonderful book Europe The first 100 Million Years a particular font of joy and continued inspiration, as well as the numerous Italian scientists to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude .

The Spectacled Salamander, like most Italians, is segregated into being either a northerner (Salamandrina perspicillata) or a southerner (Salamandrina terdigitata), divided by gene variations as well as the physical obstacle of the Volturno river, which rises in the Apennines of Molise and flows for 175 km down through Campania, doglegging west near Caserta and arriving at the Tyrrhenian Sea, just north of Naples. In case you’re interested, for human Italians the north-south division is either called the Spezia-Rimini line or the Massa-Senigalia line. I myself prefer to think of the Brioche-Cornetto line as a more accurate indicator of which side of the divide you sit on, dependant on what name you give to your breakfast. Unlike their human neighbours, it is not known whether Salamanders hold strong opinions about the intrinsic characteristics of either their northern or southern brethren.

Our friend is also known as Savi’s Salamander, in honour of the great Paolo Savi (Pisa 1798-1871) - zoologist, geologist, museologist, the father of Italian ornithology, as well as first rate taxidermist and generally one of the most impressive scientists of the 1800’s, who first described S. perspicillata in 1821. His huge legacy is preserved to this day in the University of Pisa’s wonderful museum of natural history, housed in the stunning Carthusian monastery of Calci, often over-looked by visitors to Pisa who, mistakenly in my opinion, flock instead to the wonky tower.

And herein lies the crux of the matter - as Luigi Boitani told me himself, when people think of Italy, they think of it’s art, architecture, food, fashion, fast cars and not, tragically, it’s nature. This is to overlook the fact that Italy contains the greatest biodiversity in all of Europe, with a third of all the continent’s faunal species found here (57,000), of which 4777 are endemic to the country, found nowhere else on the planet. We can also trace much of the origins of natural history, human understanding of the natural world, back to the Roman age of Pliny the Elder, his Naturalis Historia, the most complete of all surviving latin texts which remained an authority for nearly 1500 years, before Renaissance Italians took up the challenge of observing and describing the natural world. Darwin and Russell Wallace will always take the major accolades, but the seeds of their discovery were sown in Italy many centuries prior.

The Spectacled Salamander is a very special Italian indeed, and should, in my opinion, be revered as greatly as the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel, the Pantheon, Valentino’s red dress, a good cacio e pepe, or even the Ferrari 250 GTO.

As Tim Flannery notes:

Most of Europe’s core fauna is now long extinct, but there are a few unlikely survivors. The most important are the alytids (the family that includes the midwife toads) and the typical salamanders and newts (family Salamandridae). These relics of Europe’s dawning are deserving of special recognition, for they are in effect Europe’s living fossils, as precious as the platypus and lungfish…The wide distribution of The Salamandridae, whose 77 species are distributed across North America, Europe and Asia, has long obscured their point of origin, but a study of mitochondrial DNA, from 44 species has revealed that the salamandrids first evolved about 90 million years ago on an island in the European archipelago… The study also revealed that the gloriously colourful Italian spectacled salamanders diverged from the rest of the Salamandrid family while the dinosaurs still lived.

I’m going to resist the temptation to meander off and write about how amazing salamanders and newts are, with just the 160 million years of evolutionary history between them from the late Jurassic to the present… no big deal. Needless to say, the character of Gussy Fink-Nottle from the world of Jeeves and Wooster has gone up hugely in my estimation. The Spectacled Salamander is just so wonderful, so endearing, so cool and Italian with it’s glasses on, no sense of rush or urgency in it’s movement, it stays low-key in the shadows mainly prowling the night, not flashing it’s colours unless there’s a female or an enemy around. It also disdains heat, and often goes into a summer-time hibernation, something as a displaced Englishman I can sympathise with during the long Tuscan summers.

Sadly, it’s one of Italy’s many amphibians and reptiles (41 & 59 respectively) who are really not going to enjoy the changing climate of the near future. So much of Italy’s unique fauna is the result of adaptation in the ice age refuge that the peninsula became over the last 3 million years or so, with isolated niches in the landscape that was punctuated by both explosive volcanoes and vast glaciers. As some of the oldest planetary survivors still with us today, it’s the possible demise of most of our amphibians and reptiles that saddens me the most, especially one so charismatic and ancient as the Spectacled Salamander, about whose life we’ve only very recently begun to understand better. That said, it survived the end-cretaceous bolide strike, as well as the following 68 million years of climate variability, and went on to colonise nearly every continent on the planet, so who knows. We should undoubtedly pay it more respect and do everything we can to preserve the habitats it thrives in.

I do believe, like Tim Flannery, that we must find ways to revere our European fauna, especially ones of truly ancient lineage. It feels obvious to me, just as we celebrate our oldest, wisest and most successful citizens, we must equally find new ways to elevate the significance of Europe’s core fauna that long predates our arrival.

I highly recommend watching the first of Giacomo Radi’s short video series, Diari di un Naturalista, in which he seeks out the Spectacled Salamander in our shared landscape of the Maremma.