What If Gone

Species → Chinese Giant Salamander

Chinese Giant Salamander

Andrias davidianus

24 individuals detected (97-county survey)
Extinction risk Critically Endangered
Near-extinctionWaterwayCatastrophic declineScientific controversy
Chinese Giant Salamander (Andrias davidianus)
Photo: J. Patrick Fischer, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact Moderate
1 year

As the world's largest living amphibian and a likely nocturnal ambush predator in its mountain streams, the Chinese giant salamander would almost immediately stop exerting hunting pressure on the fish and aquatic invertebrates that share its habitat, leaving them a margin it had until then kept in check.

Hypothesis
10 years

Over ten years, this reduced pressure would likely benefit some of the fish and invertebrate species it hunted, letting them grow in number and shift the balance among species in the deep pools of these mountain streams — probably at the expense of the species most vulnerable to that increased competition.

Hypothesis
100 years

Across much of its range, these mountain streams have already been functioning without a confirmed wild salamander for several decades: the population collapsed by more than 80% between 1980 and 2000, and a recent survey covering 97 counties could not confirm a single genuinely wild individual. If its predator role holds, fish and invertebrates in these streams have in effect already been living without their historical regulator for several generations.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir de Turvey et al. (2018) : l'effondrement documenté de la population sauvage (80 % de perte entre 1980 et 2000, aucun individu confirmé sauvage lors du relevé de 97 comtés) est ici interprété comme une disparition fonctionnelle déjà en cours depuis plusieurs décennies dans une bonne partie de l'aire de répartition, sans qu'aucune étude ne mesure la réponse des poissons et invertébrés à cette absence.

The more than 80% collapse between 1980 and 2000 and the absence of any confirmed wild individual in the 2018 survey are directly measured facts. What remains an extrapolation is the link between this near-disappearance and the state of the fish and invertebrate communities in these streams, which has never been directly studied.

What's missing to confirm it: No study has compared the state of fish and invertebrate communities in streams where the salamander has been absent for decades to comparable streams where it would still be present — a comparison made difficult by the near-total absence of confirmed wild populations anywhere.

1000 years

Over a thousand years, even a successful restoration would probably not bring back the same balance: mass releases from commercial farms have already mixed lineages that had evolved separately, basin by basin, over millions of years, and nothing guarantees that a future, genetically homogenized population would play exactly the same local regulatory role as the one that disappeared in each of these streams.

Hypothesis

Documentation

Last verified: August 16, 2026