Red-backed Salamander

The red-backed salamander is a small, slender salamander native to forests across eastern North America, from the Maritime provinces of Canada south to the Carolinas and west to the Great Lakes. It belongs to the lungless salamander family and breathes entirely through its moist skin and the lining of its mouth, which restricts it to cool, damp microhabitats under logs, rocks, and leaf litter. It occurs in two common color forms, a striped redback morph with an orange-red band down the back and an unstriped leadback morph that is uniformly dark, both often found living side by side in the same forest. Unlike most salamanders it lays eggs on land and skips an aquatic larval stage entirely, hatching directly into miniature terrestrial adults, and it is thought to be one of the most numerous vertebrates by biomass in the hardwood forests it inhabits.