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Rough-skinned Newt — printable fact sheet
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Rough-skinned Newt
Taricha granulosa
Taricha granulosa is the single most poisonous amphibian in North America and one of the most toxic animals anywhere: its skin carries tetrodotoxin, the same sodium-channel blocker found in pufferfish, and a large newt from an Oregon population can hold enough to kill several ad…
Did you know?
- Despite their extreme toxicity, rough-skinned newts are harmless to handle if not ingested or if toxins do not enter the body through cuts or mucous membranes.
- Tetrodotoxin is probably not made by the newt itself but by symbiotic bacteria, and newts raised in captivity away from their natural microbiota become far less toxic. Some Vancouver Island and Idaho populations are almost non-toxic — precisely the places where resistant garter snakes are absent, which is the strongest single line of evidence that snake predation drives the newt's toxicity. Rough-skinned newts are strikingly bold in the open, walking across trails in daylight, an unusual confidence directly attributable to having almost no predators that can survive eating them.
What I learned
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