Range-wide decline of Chinese giant salamanders Andrias spp. from suitable habitat

Over recent decades, Chinese giant salamanders Andrias spp. have declined dramatically across much of their range. Overexploitation and habitat degradation have been widely cited as the cause of these declines. To investigate the relative contribution of each of these factors in driving the declines, we carried out standardized ecological and questionnaire surveys at 98 sites across the range of giant salamanders in China. We did not find any statistically significant differences between water parameters (temperature, dissolved oxygen, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, salinity, alkalinity, hardness and flow rate) recorded at sites where giant salamanders were detected by survey teams and/or had been recently seen by local respondents, and sites where they were not detected and/or from which they had recently been extirpated. Additionally, we found direct and indirect evidence that the extraction of giant salamanders from the wild is ongoing, including within protected areas. Our results support the hypothesis that the decline of giant salamanders across China has been primarily driven by overexploitation. Data on water parameters may be informative for the establishment of conservation breeding programmes, an initiative recommended for the conservation of these species

From dirty to delicacy? Changing exploitation in China threatens the world’s largest amphibians

Determining the dynamics and sustainability of human interactions with threatened species is essential to inform evidence-based conservation, but data can be challenging to collect across large areas and multiple user groups. Chinese giant salamanders Andrias spp. are critically depleted across China. Wild populations were exploited during the 20th century, and more recently to support a large-scale farming industry. However, robust data remain largely unavailable on the timing of population declines in relation to changing human pressures, on primary drivers of exploitation, or on the effectiveness of conservation legislation. We conducted a series of large-scale interview surveys across the range of giant salamanders in China, targeting potential rural and urban user groups, and stakeholders involved with giant salamander exploitation and policy management (comprising 2,932 rural households, 66 salamander farms, 115 county government officials and 835 urban consumers). Giant salamander populations were probably declining from at least the 1980s due to exploitation for food, and negative cultural values associated with these animals have not prevented rural consumption. There has been a major escalation in exploitation following the establishment of a large-scale giant salamander farming industry in the 2000s. Our results demonstrate wide-scale and largely unregulated illegal hunting to stock farms at a country-wide scale in order to support demand by urban consumers for high-prestige rare meat. We estimate there were at least 42,000 wild-caught breeding adult giant salamanders and 164,000 wild-caught subadults in farms across China at the time of our survey. Salamander farming probably poses unsustainable pressure on giant salamander populations. Existing legislation has clearly proved ineffective at preventing the stocking of farms with wild-caught animals, and our findings highlight an important gap in the effectiveness of China's conservation protection for some of its highest-priority threatened species. Tackling this problem will likely require multiple coordinated approaches, including enforcement of legislation, increased penalties for removing giant salamanders from the wild, permanent identification of captive-bred giant salamanders, and consumer-focused interventions to reduce urban demand