When we think of cannibalism, our minds immediately turn to gruesome images of humans eating other humans or fictional characters feasting on the flesh of other living people (especially with a nice chianti and broad beans). While cannibalism may not be a common occurrence among humans, it is a fairly widespread practice in many other species of the animal kingdom. This article will explore the behavior of cannibalism in the tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum), one of the main costs of cannibalism in these organisms: the transmission of pathogens. Cannibalism is operationally defined as the ingestion of all or part of a conspecific and is taxonomically widespread among many groups of vertebrates and invertebrates; however, it is extremely rare in most species (Dawkins, 1976; Elgar and Crespi, 1992). Cannibalism is thought to bring numerous fitness benefits, including a better balance of nutrients from conspecifics compared to heterospecifics and a competitive advantage from killing close competitors. There are also some fitness costs, thought to be associated with the rarity of cannibalism, including increased risk of injury for the cannibal, decreased indirect component of their fitness including killing relatives, and high probability of acquiring agents deleterious pathogens. and parasites superior to those experienced by non-cannibalistic predators (Dawkins, 1976; Elgar and Crespi, 1992; Hamilton, 1964; Pfennig, 1991, 1997; Sherman, 1981). As mentioned above, cannibalism is rare in many species. However, in the tiger salamander (A. tigrinum), it is a very common occurrence. Tiger salamanders have two life history stages, including a larval form and an adult form. During the larval stage... half of paper... is common in many salamanders and possibly the cause of these infections, the authors never actually tested the water for Clostridium specifically (Pfennig et al., 1991, 1997). Therefore, the pathogens under study could be viral or bacterial and could potentially have different transmission rates and effects on salamanders. Another point of contention within the study's methodology is that it was not actually tested whether the deceased animals had died from the infection or were actually infected. Rather, they simply compared the growth rate, isolation observations, and death rates of healthy animals with “sick” ones (Pfennig et al., 1991, 1997). Pfennig et al. (1991) noted, from their comparisons of parasite density, that although cannibals carried more parasites than normals simply because cannibals were larger (no correlation between number of parasites and body size)).