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Welcome to the SDGs in the News Podcast. This is Susan Yoshimura, Managing Editor of Japan 2 Earth, coming to you from Tokyo. Today, we bring you another English article on Japan and the SDGs. You can find the full text on our website. Just click the link in the episode notes. Have a listen.
Akino City makes headway in saving the endangered Tokyo salamander. The Tokyo salamander, with its black protruding eyeballs, is a small salamander endemic to Japan. It was discovered about 90 years ago in Akino City, formerly Tosai Village, of Tokyo, and named the Tokyo salamander in honor of the area where it was found. Over the past 40 years, its population has declined dramatically, and it is now an endangered species.
The city of Akino, where the salamander originally discovered, is making a concerted effort to conserve the species. Akino is located just under 50 kilometers from central Tokyo, about an hour's train ride away. Surrounded by mountains and hills on all sides, the city retains a Satoyama landscape with farms spreading across its flatlands. The Tokyo salamander lives in obscurity in this rich natural environment.
Ranging about 8 to 13 centimeters in length, the salamander's body color varies from yellowish light brown to dark brown, or black with shiny bluish-purple shades, depending on the individual. They are found in hilly areas up to 300 meters above sea level in five prefectures of the Kanto region, and particularly in the Nishitama area and the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa Prefecture.
The salamander spend most of the year in the moist ground under dead leaves and fallen trees.
In the latter half of the Shōi period, 1926 to 1989, Satoyama began to give way to housing developments. The number of salamanders began a sharp decline.
The Tokyo salamander has been listed as an endangered species, threatened to, vulnerable, on the Ministry of the Environment's red list, noted to be a species at increasing risk of extinction. Since the late 2000s, Akino City has been working to conserve the Tokyo salamander and other rare species. In 2019, the city added the salamander to its own red list, amphibians category, designating it as a species highly threatened with extinction in the wild in the near future.
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This endangered IB level designation is one level higher than the Ministry of the Environment's Class II designation.
The city has mainly utilized forest rangers, professional staff with knowledge and experience in environmental conservation in its efforts. These include continued maintenance of spawning grounds and extermination of invasive alien species such as raccoons, a natural enemy of the salamander.
It is fascinating to be able to see salamanders so close to a big city, says Pablo Aparicio, 42, from Spain. Aparicio has been conducting field surveys since the forest rangers were established in 2010.
Aparicio, who is also involved in selection for the city's red list, explains, it would be difficult for the Tokyo salamanders to make a recovery to their original number once they have decreased.
So humans need to be proactive in their conservation efforts. He also points out that the decline of the sensitive Tokyo salamander has been greatly affected by environmental changes and destruction of nature. The increase in abandoned fields due to a decreasing farming population and forests of only coniferous trees planted for their lumber are factors.
According to a survey by the Research Society on the Tokyo salamander, a group involved in the city's conservation activities, the number of exacts found at spawning sites in the city has increased by approximately 35 percent over the 20-year period since 1998.
As the only known recovery of the species in the Tama area, these numbers show that conservation efforts are bearing fruit.
Aparicio emphasizes, preserving nature does not mean just leaving it be, but rather that humans should properly care for it.
To increase the number of Tokyo salamanders, we must ensure that the surrounding natural environment, including rivers, forests, and Satoyama, is healthy. Step by step, we hope to restore the nature to its original state, he adds.
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Until next time, this is Susan Yoshimura of Japan to Earth, signing off.
