Nutrition

The food of this salamander includes worms, snails, insects, and slugs. Captive specimens will eat smaller salamanders, frogs, newborn mice, and baby snakes, and it is likely that similar items are also eaten in the wild when the opportunity presents itself. Tiger salamander larvae begin feeding on small crustaceans (e.g. ostracods, and copepods) and insect larvae but soon grow large enough to eat tadpoles and smaller salamander larvae, and even in small fish.

 

Circulatory System of the Tiger Salamander :

Amphibians and reptiles have a three-chambered heart. The three-chambered heart consists of two atria and one ventricle.  Blood leaving the ventricle passes into one of two vessels. It either travels through the pulmonary arteries leading to the lungs or through a forked aorta leading to the rest of the body. Oxygenated blood returning to the heart from the lungs through the pulmonary vein passes into the left atrium, while deoxygenated blood returning from the body through the sinus venosus passes into the right atrium. Both atria empty into the single ventricle, mixing the oxygen-rich blood returning from the lungs with the oxygen-depleted blood from the body tissues. While this system assures that some blood always passess to the lungs and then back to the heart, the mixing of blood in the single ventricle means the organs are not getting blood saturated with oxygen. This is not as efficient as a four-chambered system, which keeps the two circuits separate, but it is sufficient for these cold-blooded organisms.

 

 

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