Southeast Alaska, home of bald eagles, brown bears, humpback whales, and … what? Rough-skinned newts?

Not many tourism brochures wax poetic over the fact that you might find small, four-legged, long-tailed, poisonous amphibians under rocks and logs in parts of Southeast. But for some folks finding small critters like these generates as much excitement as seeing whales bubble-feeding or brown bears wrestling salmon from a stream.

We first heard that newts were being found in the Juneau area from our friend Dick Wood. He told us some buddies of his son Evan had been finding newts in the woods and in a marsh close to Tee Harbor. One day last July we met two of the boys, Eric and Brendan Daugherty, and their mom Susan. They took us into the woods to see for ourselves.

The boys found the first newt under a rock in the woods not far from the highway. The small, quick-moving critter was about four inches long. The skin on its sides and back was dark brown, with the rough, pebbly look that gives the species its name, Taricha granulosa. Its underside was a brilliant orange-yellow. With its four strong legs and long tail, it looked for all the world like a miniature dragon that had escaped from some children's fairy tale. As Dick held up the half-rotted chunk of wood we'd placed it on, the newt clambered up and over its ridges and crevices, rearing up and peering intently about as if to get the lay of the terrain so as to end this ridiculous exercise of being ogled and poked at by a gaggle of babbling giants.

While we were looking at the newt we met up with two other boys from the neighborhood, Henry and Daniel Melville. We put Newt Number One back under its rock and split into two groups to trudge up to the marsh where the boys said they'd often found quite a number of newts.

The boys had apparently learned something about newts in school, and it was obvious they'd also done a lot of study and research on their own. Some of them had kept newts in aquariums and watched them until their parents insisted they return them to the wild.

Daniel said he had watched a female laying eggs in the water — "laying eggs everywhere!" — and says he saw some hatch and watched the babies try to move, "wiggling their tails about four or five times a second."

Henry told us that in winter newts go into the mud at the bottom of the marsh, their breathing and heartbeat slow down, and they don't eat. "How do you know that?" we asked him. He said his brother Daniel told him. Susan wondered why the newts were found in this particular place and said several people had told her they remembered finding newts on Shelter Island.

We found it exciting to see the beautiful marsh — filled with yellow pond lilies and bordered with buckbean, Alaska cotton, and even a large patch of poison water hemlock. It looked like ideal habitat for newts, which return to quiet water with aquatic vegetation for breeding. This is the area where the boys have found sometimes a dozen newts under a single board.

We enjoyed seeing the boys' excitement over finding these fascinating critters and learning about them, whether at school, from the internet, or from watching the animals themselves. But things got even more interesting once we started tracking down more information about these shy amphibians.

"The most poisonous salamander on the planet."

We learned that some rough-skinned newts are among the most poisonous animals in the world. They secrete tetrodotoxin (TTX), one of the most potent neurotoxins known to science, from glands in their skin. The toxin is a defense against animals that typically eat small amphibians — predatory birds such as hawks, owls, jays, or herons; fish; mink, shrews, snakes, or even bears.

Besides making newts distasteful, TTX causes animals that ingest it to gasp, regurgitate, and suffer convulsions and paralysis. Most predators that ingested a toxic newt would, in fact, die, perhaps even before the newt did. The rough-skinned newts' bright yellow-orange undersides are nature's warning of toxicity (much like the yellow and black bands of wasps and bees, or the red and yellow diamond patterns of some snakes). Most animals, except the common garter snake, seem to pay attention to the warning and scratch newts off their lists of potential meals.

As we read more studies we learned that tests on laboratory mice have shown TTX is weight-for-weight 10 to 100 times as lethal as black widow spider venom and more than 10,000 times as lethal as cyanide. It has the same toxicity as saxitoxin, the neurotoxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning. Studies have shown that one adult newt can produce enough toxin to kill about seven humans.

TTX is the toxin found in pufferfish, sometimes specially prepared as raw sashimi fugu or in a soup called chiri, as a kind of dining adventure for the brave or foolhardy in Japan. It is found in a variety of other marine life, including certain sea stars, octopus, parrotfish, and horseshoe crabs, and in the South Atlantic sea squirt.

A single milligram or less of TTX — the amount that could be placed on a pinhead — is sufficient to kill an adult human, and indeed it has done so when people have ingested it. Several bizarre incidents of TTX toxicity were reported in the journal California Wild:

In July 1979, a 29-year-old college student in Oregon suddenly collapsed at a party; not long afterwards he was dead. An autopsy revealed the remnants of a rough-skinned newt in his stomach. Apparently, he had swallowed the amphibian on a dare.



In 1996, three chefs in southern California collapsed within minutes of eating very small amounts of pufferfish brought back from Japan by a co-worker. They were rushed by ambulance to a local emergency room, where all three eventually recovered.


In May 1998, two women nearly died after eating pufferfish in a Los Angeles restaurant. For a while they were totally paralyzed and required artificial ventilation in an intensive care unit for two days.

Both the Los Angeles women recovered, but the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn estimates that between 100 and 200 people a year become seriously intoxicated from TTX, and about half of them die, even with treatment.

Recent studies suggest that in some animals TTX may be generated by bacteria. Whether or not the toxin in newts is produced by bacteria is not yet known, but researchers are working to find out.

A predator and prey "arms race"?

In other research, scientists have learned that one predator — Thamnophis sirtalis, the common garter snake — has developed a resistance to TTX. While other predators that eat rough-skinned newts "virtually always die," as one study stated, this one species of garter snake continues to feed on rough-skinned newts wherever their ranges overlap.

When a garter snake swallows a newt, it may be immobilized for up to seven hours while the powerful TTX attacks its nervous system. But eventually the snake recovers. There are hazards involved for the snake. It may be caught by one of its own predators while it is immobilized, or it may overheat and die in the sun because it is unable to thermo-regulate. But after its brief period of immobility it appears to return to normal — and "normal" for these garter snakes seems to include further dining on rough-skinned newts despite suffering toxic effects.

As part of investigating this odd behavior, scientists have learned that not all newts are equally toxic. Biologists Edmund D. "Butch" Brodie, Jr. at Utah State University, and Edmund D. Brodie III at Indiana University, have been studying the toxicity of rough-skinned newts and how it relates to TTX-resistance in garter snakes in areas where their ranges overlap. Thus far they have found that some populations of newts are many times more toxic than others. They've also found that where newt populations are most toxic, the garter snakes that feed on them have developed the greatest resistance to TTX.

Thus far, the Brodies have found that newt toxicity varies by geographic area, and garter snake resistance to toxicity seems to correlate with it. Newts from the San Francisco Bay area are the most toxic, and garter snakes there are almost 100 times more resistant to TTX than snakes in any other populations sampled. Newts tested in Oregon are also highly toxic, and common garter snakes (which feed on them there) are 10 to 30 times as resistant to TTX as snakes from populations outside the range of newts. Newts from Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state have very low levels of TTX, and some have none at all. The garter snakes that feed on them also show hardly any TTX resistance.

Resistance to TTX appears to be genetically determined and thus inherited over generations. The Brodies think that garter snake populations may be evolving to overcome newt defenses, and newt toxicity may be escalating as the snakes evolve resistance. (You can read the full story in "Predator-Prey Arms Races" by Edmund D. Brodie III and Edmund D. Brodie, Jr., in the journal Bioscience, July 1999, Vol. 49, Issue 7, p. 557. The entire article is available through Data Bases for Alaskans at www.library.state.ak.us/databases).

What about newts in Southeast?

Since the Brodies' work seems to show newt toxicity decreasing as you move north through their range in the Lower 48 and British Columbia, we wondered if newts from Southeast Alaska, the northernmost part of their range, would be toxic at all. We sent several live newts from the Tee Harbor area to "Butch" Brodie, and to everyone's surprise, the newts did turn out to be toxic. This disrupts the idea of any orderly progression in level of toxicity from north to south. It also raises a number of questions.

Do all newt populations in Southeast exhibit the same levels of toxicity? What animals, if any, eat newts here in Southeast, where garter snakes do not occur? And are any predators here resistant to the TTX in our newts?

We don't have answers to these questions, but we may have them someday. Scientists have been studying TTX since the mid-1960s, because of its possible implications for human medicine. They know that TTX binds to sodium ion channels along the peripheral nerves of animals yet does not appear to reach the brain to affect consciousness and mental functions. Among other possibilities, their findings could lead to the development of drugs to block pain from chronic inflammation and nerve injuries without side effects.

The courtship sequence of newts has also been studied as a key to understanding the hormonal bases of reproductive behavior.

Perhaps some youngster fascinated by the small amphibians he finds near his rainforest home will grow up to study and find the answers to tantalizing puzzles like these. That would be a fitting acknowledgment of the importance of one of the lesser- known, less spectacular animals found here in Southeast Alaska.