Chinese Giant Salamander

Turvey, S.T., Chen, S., Tapley, B., Wei, G., Xie, F., Yan, F. et al. (2018). Imminent extinction in the wild of the world's largest amphibian. Current Biology, 28(10), R592–R594.

The Chinese giant salamander is also the world's largest living amphibian. Nearly the entire known population today lives on more than 2,400 commercial farms, where the species is raised for consumption — an industry that, in attempting to save it through mass releases into the wild, has made it nearly impossible to distinguish a wild individual from one of captive origin.

Turvey, S.T., Marr, M.M., Barnes, I., Brace, S., Tapley, B., Murphy, R.W., Zhao, E. et Cunningham, A.A. (2019). Historical museum collections clarify the evolutionary history of cryptic species radiation in the world's largest amphibians. Ecology and Evolution, 9(18), 10070–10084.

By sequencing DNA from museum specimens collected before the rise of commercial farming, the authors genetically confirm at least three distinct species — Andrias davidianus, Andrias sligoi, and a third lineage not yet formally described — where an earlier analysis based on farm animals had suggested at least five. This gap between the two studies illustrates how much farming-driven mixing has already blurred the original lineages before they could even all be formally characterized. No exhaustive genetic census of any genuinely wild populations that remain, if any do, exists yet — before farming-driven mixing makes the distinction between original lineages permanently impossible.