Marbled salamanders lovin’ the rain

Some more photos from Monday night.  Without video it’s a bit tough to capture the behavior that was going on as the salamanders came to the fence from the woods, but I’ll try to give a feel for it from stills.  First, thanks to Maria Ruiz-Lopez, a postdoc visiting the lab from Univ. of Missouri to do some genetic work on raccoon MHC.  Maria took all of the above photos.  Ok, so looking at the top left you have two salamanders interacting.  They were kind of sizing each other up, moving alongside each other and then they kind of go head to tail and “circle” around each other.  Moving clockwise in photo two you’ve got the same two animals together but note you’ve got 3 more heading their way, then in the next photo one has joined the party so you have 3 interacting and 2 heading in.  Moving down to the bottom left now you have 4 interacting and moving all over each other and 1 just about ready to join the fun.  In the next photo all 5 are partaking in the opacum fun, but it was very temporary and in the next photo you can see the group is dispersing.  This was going on all over the place Monday night.  Unfortunately almost every time we came up to them with our bright headlamps they refused to play along and stopped what they were doing.  We found spermatophores all over the place too.  Like most nights of big migrations it was clear that males were showing up first and then females later.  Too bad for the boys, I think most of their spermatophores were wasted!   May have more rain tonight, we’ll see how many more are waiting to come in.  Pretty sure about 1500 came in Monday and already about 1000 had dribbled in over the previous weeks.  Just glad I’m not the one measuring, weighing, and photographing almost every one of them!  It’s easier to write about it!