Salamanders of Toronto's High Park

Dive into the amazing world of High Park’s Eastern Red-backed Salamanders and learn all about their ecological importance for Toronto’s ravines and woodlands.

Red‑backed Salamanders of Toronto’s High Park

A Hidden Resident of High Park’s Ravines

Deep within the cool, shaded ravines of Toronto’s High Park lives one of the park’s most elusive creatures: the Eastern Red‑backed Salamander (Plethodon cinereus). Unlike most amphibians, this species has no lungs. Instead, it relies entirely on its moist skin to absorb oxygen, making damp, mature woodlands essential for its survival. Fallen logs, rotting stumps, decaying leaves, and deep forest debris provide the constant moisture it needs to breathe and avoid fatal dehydration.

Although few visitors ever see one, the Red‑backed Salamander is often the most abundant vertebrate in healthy forest ecosystems across eastern North America. In High Park, however, their numbers are small and restricted to just a handful of ravines and woodlands, making their conservation especially important.

Rarely Seen, Yet Ecologically Abundant

Despite their ecological importance, Red‑backed Salamanders often go unnoticed. They are slender-bodied and tiny, smaller than a paperclip at birth and rarely longer than a French fry as adults. They remain well hidden beneath damp logs and leaf litter, venturing out mostly at night and during rainstorms. High Park’s salamander population is also limited to a few ravines. In a pristine ravine ecosystem where conditions are optimal, the red-backed salamanders often outnumber all the birds and mammals combined. When a ravine habitat is degraded, the salamander population becomes vulnerable.

Salamanders come in two colour phases: the familiar “red‑back” form with a bright stripe along the spine, and the “lead‑back” form, which is solid dark grey or black. Its red form is believed to mimic the toxic red eft stage of a juvenile Eastern Newt offering salamanders an evolutionary advantage against predators.

Life in the Moist Shadows

Moisture is key to a salamander’s survival as drying out would be fatal. It dictates nearly everything salamanders do — when they forage, where they hide, and how they survive lean times. During or just after rainfall, they roam the wet forest floor hunting spiders, mites, ants, beetles, worms, flies, and other tiny invertebrates. As conditions dry, they retreat deeper into leaf layers, under logs, or into small burrows. On hot, dry days they disappear underground entirely.

Red‑backed Salamanders defend small territories during the summer and may travel no more than half a metre in a day. In fall, mature salamanders choose their lifelong mates. pairs reunite to re‑establish and defend shared territories. To set courtship in motion, a newly matured male claims a small patch of forest floor and guards it aggressively, marking the boundaries of the territory with his droppings. When a female salamander comes along, she crushes the male’s droppings, inspects the contents and determines if her potential mate has a worthy territory based on the prey in his diet, with a particular preference for soft-bodied invertebrates like ants. If pleased, she enters his territory and the two of them defend it together in a protective ritual that includes displaying threatening challenges, attacking intruders, and leaving scent markings to demarcate their territory.

In winter, the entire population of salamanders retreats below the frost line, sheltering underground in root hollows and small‑mammal burrows. In the spring, salamanders come out of hibernation and males find and follow the scent of their mate’s pheromone trail.

Devoted Mothers and Ingenious Survival Strategies

Red‑backed Salamanders are unique among Ontario’s amphibians in that they never require standing water at any life stage. In late spring, females deposit clumps of eggs in moist cavities such as decaying stumps and hollow rotting logs. Until they hatch, the mother keeps her body curled around them for around eight weeks to prevent dehydration. During this time, she only eats if prey happens to be nearby. The physical toll of this intense maternal care with minimal nutrition means females typically breed only every other year. After hatching in late summer, young hatchlings remain with their mother for another few weeks before dispersing.

Salamanders also possess remarkable defenses. Their skin produces antifungal chemicals that prevents disease-causing fungi from growing on their damp bodies in their moist, fungi‑rich environment. When threatened by predators, they can detach their tails as a distraction and escape. However, regrowing their tail slowly depletes stored energy reserves.

A Keystone Player in Ravine Health

Red‑backed Salamanders are vital to the health of High Park’s ravine ecosystems. By feeding on the invertebrates that consume fungi, they influence the abundance and diversity of fungal communities that decompose organic matter, recycle nutrients, and support forest health from deep in the soil to the top of the forest canopy. The healthier the salamander population, the healthier the fungal community.

Unfortunately, their habitat is extremely vulnerable to damage. Informal trails, off‑leash dog activity, dominant introduced species of plants, and soil compaction due to increased foot traffic damage the delicate forest floor where these salamanders forage and shelter.

Even more alarming is a global threat: an introduced fungus — Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans or Bsal for short — that poses a major threat to salamander populations in Europe and North America. Spread through the amphibian pet trade, it has already devastated salamander populations in Europe. Scientists across North America continue monitoring and testing in hopes of keeping this pathogen from taking hold in this continent.

Listen and Observe, But Please Don’t Disturb

Salamanders are not commonly seen out in the open in High Park. If you encounter them, they are best left undisturbed.

You can also help monitor herps in High Park! Submit your observations of reptiles and amphibians through the Herps of Ontario project on iNaturalist.

Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas

Published by Ontario Nature, the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas is the most comprehensive source of current knowledge and information about herptiles in the province.

The atlas contains 443 information-packed pages, supported by more than 70 maps and 300 photographs. The publication is the result of a decade of extensive outreach and community-building efforts that engaged people from across the province in research and conservation at an unprecedented scale.

City of Toronto's Biodiversity Booklet

Reptiles and Amphibians of Toronto is an essential resource to identify the 23 species that can be found in Toronto’s urban ecosystems. It will help you discover a new world beneath your feet and perhaps change your thinking about how we approach those ecosystems we share with animals and plants. If you want to find snakes, turtles, frogs, toads and salamanders, and learn who they are and what they do, this book is the perfect place to start.