Range-wide decline of Chinese giant salamanders Andrias spp. from suitable habitat B EN JAMI N TAPLEY,SAMUEL T. TURVEY,SHU CHE N,GANG WEI,FEN G XIE


J IAN YANG,ZHIQIAN G L IANG,HAI FENG TIAN,MIN Y A O WU ,SUMIO OKADA J IE WANG,J IN GCAI L Ü,FEN G ZHOU ,JINGCHENG XU,HAI PEN G ZHAO J AY REDBOND,THOMAS BROWN and ANDREW A. CUNNINGHAM


Abstract 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 inves- tigate 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.Wedid not find any statistically significant differences between water parameters (tempera- ture, 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 salaman- ders 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 in- formative for the establishment of conservation breeding programmes, an initiative recommended for the conserva- tion of these species.


Keywords Amphibian, Andrias, China, conservation, local ecological knowledge, overexploitation, population decline, water chemistry


Supplementary material for this article is available at doi.org/10.1017/S0030605320000411


Introduction


2020). They are threatened by multiple processes that may act synergistically to drive population declines. One of the most significant threats is habitat loss (Gallant et al., 2007). However, some amphibian species have disappeared fromin- tact or suitable habitats (Daszak et al., 1999; Hirschfeld et al., 2016),with such declines usually having beenmediatedby dis- ease (Skerratt et al., 2007;Stegen etal., 2017) or related to over- exploitation (Stuart et al., 2006; Phimmachak et al., 2012). The Chinese giant salamander is a Critically Endangered


A BENJAMIN TAPLEY (Corresponding author, orcid.org/0000-0002-9787-3793),


SAMUEL T. TURVEY,SHU CHEN,JAY REDBOND*, THOMAS BROWN and ANDREW A. CUNNINGHAM Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4RY, UK. E-mail ben.tapley@zsl.org


FENG XIE and JIE WANG Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu, China


JINGCHENG XU College of Life and Environment Sciences, Huangshan University, Huangshan, China


GANGWEI and JINGCAI LÜ Guiyang University, Guiyang, China JIAN YANG Guangxi Teachers Education University, Nanning, China HAIFENG TIAN Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, Wuhan, China ZHIQIANG LIANG Hunan Fisheries Research Institute, Changsha, China MINYAOWU and FENG ZHOU Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China SUMIO OKADA Totorri University, Koyama-Minami, Tottori, Japan HAIPENG ZHAO Henan University, Kaifeng, China *Also at: Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, Slimbridge, Gloucester, UK


Received 17 February 2020. Revision requested 7 April 2020. Accepted 7 May 2020. First published online 24 February 2021.


aquatic cryptobranchid salamander. It has been identified as a global priority for conservation based on the evolutionary distinctiveness of its so-called living fossil lineage (Gumbs et al., 2018), andwas designated as a State 2 protected animal in China in 1998, with this national legislation making hunt- ing illegal (Liang et al., 2004). It has traditionally been in- terpreted as the single geographically wide-ranging species Andrias davidianus, distributed across multiple montane ecoregions and river basins (Yangtze, Yellow, Pearl, and south-east river drainages), but has recently been shown to constitute a complex of at least three species, including the South China giant salamander A. sligoi and other un- described taxa (Yan et al., 2018; Liang et al., 2019; Turvey et al., 2019). Giant salamanders were formerly widespread over much of China (Liang et al., 2004; Fei et al., 2006), but in recent decades many populations have undergone dramatic declines or extirpations (Turvey et al., 2018), even in habitats that appear suitable and support abundant prey (Tapley et al., 2015). The range-wide decline of giant salamanders across China has been attributed to overexploi- tation for the luxury food market (Liang et al., 2004;Wang et al., 2004; Feng et al., 2007; Dai et al., 2009; Cunningham et al., 2016; Turvey et al., 2018), and to habitat loss and


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(3), 373–381 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605320000411


mphibians are themost threatened vertebrate class,with 41% of assessed species in danger of extinction (IUCN,


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