Salamander

If you're a Salamander

You are not aggressive, but you are clearly marked, and anyone who ignores the markings learns something. You come out at night, after rain, on your own, and you return to the same few places for years. People assume you are standoffish; you are just toxic to the careless and reasonable with everyone else. You remember where you were comfortable.

A fire salamander secretes a nerve toxin called samandarin from glands behind its head, and can spray it at an attacker.

The Salamander as a spirit animal

You are self-contained, nocturnal in spirit, and you make your boundaries visible so that nobody has to test them. You are loyal to places more than to crowds: the same path, the same crevice, the same handful of people. The flaw is that visible warnings keep away the curious as well as the careless. A salamander does not walk into fire; it walks out of it, slowly, and very annoyed.

Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.

How to get along with a Salamander

When it goes wrong: A threatened salamander arches, shows its yellow and may spray; step back, lower your voice and let it reach the damp.

The Salamander in a relationship

You take your time, you are choosy, and you are not especially good at the first approach, which in your species involves the male crawling underneath and carrying the female around for a while. Once it is settled you carry what is yours for a long time, quietly, and deliver it somewhere safe.

Best matchBadgerBoth patrol the same European woodland at night along paths they have used for years, and both prefer it dark.

Handle with careHummingbirdA hummingbird's heart can run over a thousand beats a minute; a salamander's metabolism would call that an emergency.

Field notes

Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works

Sociability

0

Boldness

6

Energy

2

Curiosity

3

Devotion

2

Roaming

1

• The fire connection probably comes from salamanders hiding in damp logs and crawling out when those logs were thrown on the hearth.
• A fire salamander kept in a German museum lived for more than fifty years.
• Females carry their larvae inside for months and release them, already swimming, into a stream.

Salamanders in literature

• Archivarius Lindhorst — The Golden Pot, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1814)
• The salamander in the fire — The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Benvenuto Cellini (1728)
• The Salamander — A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, Paracelsus (1566)

Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.

Closest personalities

The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Salamander's. If you got Salamander, one of these was probably your runner-up.

• 

  Tortoise96% alike

• 

  Praying Mantis95% alike

• 

  Cobra90% alike

Other reptiles & amphibians

CrocodileChameleonTortoiseCobraGeckoFrogAxolotl

Among the 60

Deutschlands Amphibien und Reptilien, Bruno Dürigen (1897). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits