Reticulated Flatwoods Salamander

The reticulated flatwoods salamander is a mole salamander of the southeastern coastal plain, found in the western Florida panhandle and extreme southwestern Georgia, and formerly in southern Alabama. It is a medium sized salamander, 40 to 50 millimeters from snout to vent, with a long head, tapered snout, 14 to 16 costal grooves, and a net like reticulated pattern of thin gray lines on a brownish black back, with a dark belly sparsely speckled white. It lives in leaf litter beneath longleaf pine and wiregrass in seasonally wet pine flatwoods and savannas that depend on periodic summer fire. It is listed as endangered by both the IUCN and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, threatened chiefly by habitat destruction and the mismanagement of the fires the longleaf pine ecosystem needs.