Bobby Moore, age 8, of Florence, S.C., for his question:
WHAT IS A MUD PUPPY?
When an ordinary puppy takes to the water, he dog paddles with all his might to keep his head above the surface. However, a mud puppy has gills for taking his oxygen from the water and he remains under water all his life. Such animals do not have voices like those of air breathing animals and even if they had, they could not use them.
The mud puppy is a salamander and an amphibian animal. The word amphibian means a creature of land and water, and the amphibious frogs and toads spend part of their lives in the water and part on land. Frogs begin life as jellified eggs, afloat in a pond. They spend their kindergarten days in the water as tadpoles and later develop lungs to cope with life in the air. Many salamanders follow the same life history but the mud puppy keeps his fish like gills throughout life and never leaves the water.
However, like all amphibians, the mud puppy has a remarkable breathing apparatus and breathing is related to the sound an animal makes with his voice. A frog cannot croak until he exchanges his tadpole gills for a pair of air breathing lungs. In his mouth is an opening that leads down to his lungs and his croaking is done with his mouth tightly closed. Air is forced back and forth from lungs to mouth, passing over the vocal cords. His method is primitive, but his ancestors were the first animals to find voices.
Air is necessary to croak or yell, to whistle like a bird or bark like a dog. Water breathing animals do not have voices to make sounds of this kind. Fishes cannot sing like birds and the octopus cannot even hum. The starfish cannot croak or even grunt and the mud puppy cannot bark. The mud puppy has gills for taking his oxygen from the water, but they are not like the gills of a mackerel. His gills are feather like fringes where you would expect to find his ears.
No amphibian depends entirely upon lungs or gills. He is blessed with a most amazing skin that can feed oxygen directly into his blood stream. The oxygen must be dissolved in water or moisture. It is trapped by the skin and absorbed by surface air or water and every amphibian insists on keeping his skin moist. The mud puppy has gills and his amazing skin for breathing but since he has no lungs he cannot bark.
This puppy is not a youthful dog and is no relative to the canine family of animals. Andy does not know why he is called a puppy but his squatty body, his weak and stubby legs and his shaggy neck look somewhat puppyish. The mud part of his name is easier to.understand because he prefers to spend his adult life in two to six feet of muddy water.