In both animals a sticky pad at the tip of the tongue immobilizes the insect until it can be brought into the mouth. Deban predicts that other members of the genus Hydromantes also use a ballistic method to protract the tongue, because all have the same tongue structure and internal cartilage.
Among these are the only species native to North America, all three from California: the Shasta salamander from northern California; the Mount Lyell salamander that lives in the Sierra Nevada; and the limestone salamander from the area of the Merced River.
Wake suspects that many members of the lungless salamander family do likewise. Most members of Hydromantes live entirely on land, spending part of the year in caves or crevices, walking around on rock walls with the aid of large webbed feet, laying eggs in moist places and living off insects and other small creatures. Even before Deban's discovery they were known to have the longest tongues relative to their body of any amphibian, though none have tongues approaching the length of the much larger chameleons, members of the lizard family, Chameleonidae.
These salamanders are quick with their tongues too. They can flick them out in about a hundredth of a second, much faster than chameleons, Wake says. Also, while a chameleon's tongue falls slack and is rewound into the mouth after catching a fly, salamanders jerk their tongues back.
The salamander can do this because the muscle that retracts the tongue into the mouth contracts as the tongue flies outward, enabling it to pull back quickly upon hitting the insect.
Some frogs also employ ballistic protraction, Deban notes, though they have no tongue skeleton and simply throw the tongue muscle out of the mouth. Deban and a post-doctoral student in the museum, Mario Garcia-Paris, reported two years ago that one of the related California salamanders, the Mount Lyell salamander Hydromantes platycephalus , is unique in another way.
Deban soon will head off to Roth's laboratory in Germany to continue his study of how the brain coordinates the muscle contractions to shoot the tongue out, and how this coordination might have been modified from a more general tongue-pushing system.
He is interested in how such an extreme system might have evolved in Hydromantes and its shorter-tongued relatives. Copyright for all items on this server held by The Regents of the University of California. Thanks for your interest in UC Berkeley. Corner Fit. Corner Fit with Speaker Integreation. Barcelona, White more sizes and finishes.
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