Physical Description and Feeding
Cryptobranchids are largest salamanders, with large folds of skin along their flanks. These help increase the animal's surface area, allowing them to absorb more oxygen from the water. They have four toes on the forelimbs, and five on the hind limbs. Their metamorphosis from the larval stage is incomplete, so that the adults retain gill slits (although they also have lungs), and lack eyelids. They can reach a static size of 2 meters (6 feet 6 inches) in length. They weigh up to 145 lbs. Chinese Giant Salamanders have lived as long as 75 years in captivity. The Chinese giant salamander eats aquatic insects, fish, frogs and also crabs and shrimp.
They hunt mainly at night, and as they have poor eyesight, they use sensory nodes on their head and body to detect minute changes in water pressure, allowing them to detect their prey.
Read more about this topic: Giant Salamander
Famous quotes containing the words physical, description and/or feeding:
“Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)