We came across a newt while hiking a few months ago. It happens surprisingly infrequently so I took a picture to identify it later. When we got home, I realized that it was a rough skinned newt, which was especially cool because one of my ‘sense of touch’ collaborators at Stanford studied the newts in her graduate work and we’d talked about them a few times. In her graduate work, she researched a tetrodoxin arms race between the rough skinned newt and garter snake. Here’s a newspaper article that nicely summarizes it. What it all boils down to is that if you come across a brown newt around the Bay Area, don’t lick it. Here are some more photos and videos.

[shashin type=”photo” id=”2957” size=”large” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]