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| Blue-spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
Date:
April 4th 2015
Species Found:
- Spotted Salamander (Ambystoma maculatum)
- Blue-spotted Salamander (Ambystoma laterale)
- Western Chorus Frog (Pseudacris triseriata)
- Eastern Newt (Notophthalamus viridescens)
- Northern Green Frog (Lithobates clamitans melanota)
The Trip:
Tristan had herped in Will County before and found a lot of cool species that Noah and I had never seen. We decided to make a stop there after we were done helping with the mudpuppy research. We got there and started making our way toward the ponds. Deer were everywhere and what was weird was that these deer seemed to be more brave than the other deer I had seen. You could get as close as 10 meters to them before they ran away. We finally got to a pond and flipped a log by the water's edge. Surprisingly, 2 of the species we had come to find were sitting right there. A Spotted Salamander, which I had seen before, and a Blue-spotted Salamander, a new species for me. I was really excited to see my first Blue-spotted but I was just as excited about the Spotted because it had orange spots on its head, a trait that I had never seen before.
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| Salamander and Frog Habitat: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Under the first log we flipped: PC Tristan Schramer |
We knew we would find more of these salamanders so we carried on without taking too many photos of these. The second log we flipped had a large gravid Spotted Salamander. It was the fattest salamander I had ever seen.
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| Gravid Female Spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
As we continued to look under logs, we found whole clumps of these salamanders, just crawling all over each other. We also found some salamanders living in the logs, under the bark.
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| Salamanders under log: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Salamanders under log: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Salamander living in log: PC Tristan Schramer |
We then settled down by a pond to photograph the salamanders. As pretty as they were, they were frustrating specimens to photograph. They just refused to sit still for longer than a second.
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| Spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Blue-spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Blue-spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Blue-spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Blue-spotted Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
Some of the salamanders we found had some weird lumps on their throats and bellies. We weren't sure what this was but we knew it wasn't good news. We took pictures of the affected areas to forward to herpetologists so that they would be able to find out what was wrong.
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| Diseased Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Diseased Salamander: PC Tristan Schramer |
The background music to all of this was the deafening sound of Chorus Frogs calling. A small log that I flipped had a small Chorus Frog under it.
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| Western Chorus Frog: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Western Chorus Frog: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Western Chorus Frog: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Western Chorus Frog: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Western Chorus Frog: PC Tristan Schramer |
We moved away from the small ponds and went to a large pond with lots of vegetation and algae in it. Tristan said that this would be a good place to find newts, an amphibian that I had never seen before. It took about 5 minutes for Tristan to catch a male Eastern Newt in his net. This was a new species for me so I took my time examining it. Its skin was much rougher than the skin of any salamander I had seen before. Newts are also known to be poisonous, but only when ingested. I had no plans of eating the newt so I was pretty safe. Tristan later caught a female with a large, fin-like tail.
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| Eastern Newt: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Eastern Newts: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Male Eastern Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Male Eastern Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Male Eastern Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Female Eastern Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Female Eastern Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
Somehow Tristan managed to get pictures of the newt yawning. This was hilarious.
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| Yawning Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
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| Yawning Newt: PC Tristan Schramer |
At some point we caught a tadpole of a Northern Green Frog. It looked a lot like the Bullfrog tadpoles I had seen before but the spots were different.
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| Green Frog Tadpole: PC Yatin Kalki |
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| Green Frog Tadpole: PC Yatin Kalki |
This trip was pretty successful. I got 2 new species to add to my American Herp List, which now stood at 48 species.
UPDATE:
We sent the photos of the diseased salamanders to herpetologists Chris Phillips and Andrew Kuhns and wildlife veterinarian Matt Allender. According to them, the lumps were formed by "yellow grub", a parasitic fluke that needs salamanders (or fish) to complete its life cycle. Here is the wikipedia excerpt:
Yellow grub require two intermediate hosts, usually a snail and a fish, but in vernal ponds salamanders are often infected, and one definitive host - birds. If an infected salamander is ingested by a heron or other wading bird, the fluke matures in the throat of the bird, eggs are released through the birds feces, hopefully back into the water, and picked up on the foot of a snail, they then reproduce asexually and exit the snail foot as free swimming larvae in search of another fish or salamander to repeat the cycle.
It is unclear what effect this parasite has on the salamander's survival, but the disease is apparently quite widespread.
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