What a crazy marbled salamander season! It is bone dry outside--even the normal humidity we experience here is gone--yet yesterday Brian found over 350 salamanders at Rainbow Bay (see his comment on entry from 10-14). When we bring the salamanders from the field to the lab we put them in ziplock bags or plastic bins with lots of moist paper towels--like the stack of bins in the upper right photo. When Brian put the marbleds in bins it seems they were thrilled for some moisture at long last. By the time he got back to SREL there were spermatophores in the bins! Males weren’t going to pass up the opportunity. Yesterday was really the first day a reasonable number of females starting showing up. Today I got to help release a lot of the sals caught yesterday. As mentioned before--they get brought back to the lab to be “processed”--meaning many of them get to pose for photos, get weighed, and get measured. It’s really fun to release them, we clear a little spot in the leaf litter, put them down and watch them go--as in the photo in the bottom. They are pretty quick to start burrowing their way under the litter--you can see this a little in the brief video I uploaded to You Tube. One of the sals found yesterday was really unique--all of them have unique patterns but this one was nearly entirely black which only happens about 1 out of every 3,000 sals. The one in the picture in the middle had very faint white bands across it’s tail but other than that it was all black. Pretty cool find.
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