Jiangxi giant salamander
The Jiangxi giant salamander is a species of very large salamander endemic to Jiangxi Province in China. It is the only Chinese Andrias species known to have a genetically pure wild population.
Discovery and description
Prior to 2018, all giant salamanders in China were thought to belong to a single species: the Chinese giant salamander, the largest known amphibian species. However, a major genetic study that year found deep divergences between lineages of the Chinese giant salamander, with many genetically distinct clades restricted to different river basins, and thus proposed it to be a species complex comprising at least 5 different species. In addition, none of these species were known to have native wild populations, with most wild individuals being releases from salamander breeding farms and belonging to multiple different lineages or hybrids between them. One of the lineages identified in the study was named clade U2, but its exact geographic origin remained uncertain due to the only specimens being of farm-bred individuals.Despite the 2018 study finding no evidence of wild Chinese giant salamander populations, other researchers found these assessments to be biased, with much of the survey effort being targeted within either a single county or in regions that were predicted to have suitable habitat but had no historic records of giant salamanders. For this reason, targeted surveys involving closed nature reserves were taken from 2020 to 2022. This led to the discovery of a breeding population of giant salamanders in the Jiulingshan National Nature Reserve in Jing'an County, Jiangxi Province. Genetic analysis of this population found it to be genetically pure with no evidence of intermixing with translocated individuals, and also found them to match with the U2 clade identified in previous studies. This lineage was thus described as a distinct species, Andrias jiangxiensis.