While most salamanders are the size of your finger, Chinese giant salamanders can be as big as your entire body. Even average individuals can grow to Labrador size. Their heads are broad and flattened, their eyes are small and lidless, and their bodies look like something you might find left behind in a toilet. Their skin has the color of a brownie and the texture of a wet prune. When disturbed, they make a noise that sounds uncannily like a crying baby; in Chinese, their common name translates to “infant fish.”

In five years of searching, Andrew Cunningham and his 80-strong team of surveyors barely heard that noise. In what is possibly the largest wildlife survey ever conducted in China, they scoured 50 sites in the Chinese provinces where these behemoths once thrived. They swept rivers and streams with their headlamps. They flipped over rock after rock. They put out bait. But after all that effort, they found just 24 individuals. And genetic analyses suggest that most of these—maybe even all—had escaped or been released from farms.
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These giants are part of the oldest lineage of salamanders, which separated from the others around 170 million years ago—a time before flowers and birds, before Brontosaurus and Stegosaurus. There are only two other surviving species from this ancient lineage: one from Japan, and the hellbender salamander from the eastern United States. All of them are in decline, but the Chinese giant salamander is especially so.
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Bizarrely, only 3 percent of the animals raised by the farms are eventually sold to restaurants. The rest are sold to more start-up farms. This absurd amphibian Ponzi scheme so inflated the worth of the salamanders that a small, 2-kilogram individual could sell for around $1,500. As a result, people began supplementing the farmed stock by illegally collecting the animals from the wild. “The high prices created a sort of salamander rush,” says Jing Che from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, who was involved in the recent study.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/how-a-pyramid-scheme-doomed-the-worlds-largest-amphibians/560786/