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:
“It takes a good deal of physical courage to ride a horse. This, however, I have. I get it at about forty cents a flask, and take it as required.”
—Stephen Leacock (1869–1944)
“I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilisation. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that their reformation must be worked, and that Missionaries of that description from [France] would avail more than those who should endeavor to tame them by precepts of religion or philosophy.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)