Amphibian monitoring

Male Long-toed salamander

Yesterday was amphibian day. I went to my favorite city park, Carkeek Park in Seattle to participate in an amphibian monitoring training. At one time, I worked as a naturalist there developing and teaching lots of natural history programs to all ages. I digress. Yesterday was the second part of the training on how to properly monitor for amphibians in wetlands. A coworker and I attended since we are going to incorporate this into our monitoring program at work.


When I worked at Carkeek, the manmade wetland was too "new" to support amphibians; the Ph of the water was off. It's great to return and see Pacific chorus frogs and long-toed salamanders have reclaimed the area. The group found a chorus frog egg mass and a long-toed egg mass. For many reasons, I decided not to muck around in the wetland. I was standing on the boardwalk when I saw a tiny object writhing around in a muddy boot print. The WDFW biologist went over and picked up a male long-toed salamander. I don't know if you can tell in the photo, but there's a fin of sorts on the top of his tail. It's called a "tail blade". This signals he's looking for a female to mate with and continue their progeny. He does not have the tail blade outside of breeding season. We found two so there were likely more around. Being our earliest breeding salamander it's no wonder we found them in the cold and rain of February.


This salamander is one of our most widespread but you wouldn't know it. The adults spend most of their lives hidden away under the ground so are rarely seen. Bad news for the chorus frogs- long-toed larvae eat them as tadpoles. Doesn't seem like good survival strategy to lay your eggs right next to theirs. 


here's a link to the Seattle Times article-
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/picturethis/2017598685_pondwatch.html
Oh, and the part about the biologist finding the salamander; well you already know who really found it.