( eographical question: How in the world ...)Discovery of an American salamander where it shouldn't be: Korea

Karsen made the discovery in April 2003 while looking for salamanders in a wooded Korean upland as he would in his native Illinois - by turning over rocks. The plethodontids were probably overlooked, Wake said, because the newly discovered salamanders are fully terrestrial, whereas all other Asian salamanders breed in water. Korean biologists, though actively studying other salamanders and finding other new species, they did not expect to find a family of salamanders never before seen in Asia.

"People have gone on expeditions looking for terrestrial salamanders, in places like Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics," said Wake. "They didn't bother with northern China or Korea or Japan because we thought we knew everything that was there. And so here (in Korea) they show up, and in the most surprising way, when some guy who's a high school teacher from Illinois goes out with his class and says, 'Let's look for salamanders, let's see what we can find when we turn over rocks and logs.'"

To date, the salamander has been found in 16 locations in three Korean provinces, and Wake and his colleagues have established that it differs significantly from all other lungless salamanders, which make up 70 percent of the known 535 salamander species in the world. Wake and his colleagues placed the species in a new genus of plethodontids, Karsenia. The animal's common name will be the Korean crevice salamander, for its preferred abode, limestone crevices.

As the name implies, lungless salamanders from the family Plethodontidae have no lungs and breathe through moist skin. Because these nocturnal animals live, breed and lay their eggs on land, they typically are found in areas with abundant rainfall, such as the eastern United States. They are most
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Source:University of California - Berkeley