Salamanders can be killed by a passing vehicle’s pressure wave without direct contact

Evidence

It turns out that tallying death is easy: they’ve developed a system for identifying the species of animal by the size of the blotch it leaves on the road, which is then scraped up to avoid counting it again on the next traverse of the road. Sometimes death occurs even without collision. Salamanders are so soft bodied that merely the pressure wave generated by a passing vehicle can be fatal. The missing number is the denominator of the death equation—the number of animals who do make it safely across. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1308

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Road traffic is the salamanders’ greatest immediate threat during mating migration — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1299