How Long Do Giant Salamanders Live? Lifespan Records

Giant salamander lifespans at a glance

There are six or more living species of giant salamanders, but good longevity data exist for only three of them. The figures below are the commonly cited ones; captive records are maximums, not typical ages.

Other species, such as the South China giant salamander, were recognized only recently, and nothing reliable is known about their lifespans.

How long do Chinese giant salamanders live?

The Chinese giant salamander is often said to live for 50–60 years or more, and some reference works state that captive animals have lived at least 60 years. The longevity database AnAge, however, treats the maximum as not yet established, noting a documented captive record of about 20 years in North American zoos and anecdotal reports of more than 50 years.

The honest answer is that these salamanders probably can live for many decades, but there is no single, well-documented record to match the claims. Part of the problem is that the animals keep growing throughout their lives, and age is often guessed from size, which is unreliable. News stories about cave or farm salamanders said to be 100 or 200 years old are guesses of this kind and are not accepted by scientists.

The Japanese giant salamander record

The oldest well-documented giant salamander was a Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus) taken to Europe in the 1820s by the physician and naturalist Philipp Franz von Siebold, who worked in Japan. The animal lived in captivity in the Netherlands for about 52 years, much of that time at the Natura Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam. AnAge lists a maximum longevity of about 55 years for the species.

Japanese giant salamanders are also thought to live a long time in the wild, and figures of up to about 80 years are sometimes quoted. Those wild estimates have not been confirmed by long-term studies, so they should be treated as possibilities rather than facts.

How long do hellbenders live?

The hellbender, the giant salamander of the eastern United States, has the best wild data of the family thanks to long-running field studies. Animals that survive to adulthood commonly live 12–15 years, and some wild hellbenders are estimated to reach 25–30 years. Captive hellbenders have lived about 29–30 years.

Hellbenders mature late, at about 5–8 years old, and adults may keep breeding for many years. Long life is important for them, because very few eggs and larvae survive. A population can look healthy for years while being made up mostly of old adults with almost no young animals coming through, which is one reason declines are easy to miss.

Why do giant salamanders live so long?

Several features help giant salamanders reach great ages:

• Slow metabolism. They live in cool water and use little energy. Chinese giant salamanders can go for long periods without eating.
• Late maturity. Animals that start breeding late, after five years or more, tend to live longer, a pattern seen across many animal groups.
• Few predators as adults. Once a giant salamander is large, very few animals can eat it, so adult survival is high.
• Stable homes. They spend their lives in cool, sheltered streams with small territories, avoiding many of the risks faced by animals that migrate or live in exposed places.

Long life does not make them safe. Because they breed slowly and take years to mature, giant salamander populations recover very slowly after overharvesting or habitat damage.

How scientists tell a salamander’s age

Ages for wild amphibians are hard to measure. In captivity, records simply count the years from arrival or birth. In the wild, scientists use mark-recapture studies, marking individuals and finding them again over many years, and skeletochronology, which counts yearly growth rings in a thin section of bone, a little like tree rings. For very long-lived animals, these rings can become crowded and hard to read, so maximum ages are often underestimated or uncertain.

How do giant salamanders compare with other long-lived amphibians?

Giant salamanders are long-lived, but they are not the record holders. The olm, a small blind cave salamander from the Balkans, is predicted to live more than 100 years, as explained in How long do olms live? Common toads have lived more than 30 years in captivity, while most small frogs live only a few years. Many other remarkable records are gathered in our list of the longest-living animals.