One time, when I was eight or nine years old, I was wandering up and down the banks of eastern Iowa’s Wapsipinicon (Wapsie) River, exploring while my grandfather was fishing. While walking along a muddy section of riverbank, I saw something wriggling in the silt and caught it. It was a curious beast, like a salamander, but it still had its feathery gills that normally only juvenile salamanders wear, and this one was big, maybe six inches long. I took it to show to Grandpa, wanting to know what it was.
“It’s a mud puppy,” he told me. “It’s harmless. Best let it go.” So I did, and later in my career, I would see these things in streams and rivers from time to time and let them go unmolested, remembering Grandpa’s words. The mud puppy, like other salamanders, is an amphibian, and its life cycle is irretrievably tied to the water.
There is another, larger salamander in the United…
