Back from the long hot summer

To the few of you who were loyally following the blog I apologize for disappearing.  After a cold dry winter we had an even dryer summer which made things somewhat uninteresting in the field here.  That is of course unless you absolutely love spiders b/c we find TONS of those--like the one in the photo.  But fall is here and with or without rain the marbled salamanders dutifully return to their breeding grounds.  This year we have a much bigger study going with them.  Near the main study site, Rainbow Bay, are four other wetlands that marbleds go to: Linda's Pond, Bullfrog Pond, Pickerel Pond, and NPR pond.  One question we are interested in is how much movement is there among the ponds.  In the past David Scott has done some work on several species of Ambystomatid salamanders to estimate dispersal from Rainbow Bay to the other sites.  We're doing it again this year b/c in the Spring of 2010 we had over 10,000 marbled salamander metamorphs come out of Rainbow.  This fall would be when most of those are ready to breed so we can see which pond they show up at (they all are marked).  It was hard work but we (ie: David) opened up partial fences at the other sites and now several of us are running all the bays when it rains (rarely).  We've had about 2000 adults come back to Rainbow so far and much less than that at the partial fences, but we've definitely seen some that were born at RB and have dispersed to other sites.  Will be great to get the final numbers later.  The image shows how the wetlands are related to each other and where the fences are located.


Off to The Wildlife Society meeting in Hawaii tomorrow!!

H-02 wetland metamorphs

Quite a while back I did a several post series on the ecotoxicology studies we are doing at the H-02 wetlands (starting Jan 24, 2011).  Those continue and are mostly focused on some lab and mesocosm studies of southern toads right now (more on that next week), but we continue to do some field work in the wetlands.  part of the goal is to keep track of which species have been able to not only colonize the wetlands, but successfully reproduce in them.  The way our drift fence is set up we can't tell which wetland cell the metamorphs come from, but at least we know there is somewhere in the wetlands where they can make it.  The last couple of weeks we are getting a good number of metamorphs for green frogs, bullfrogs, and southern leopard frogs.  The fact that those three species are doing well there is somewhat surprising since they have a very long larval period and have to spend all of that time in the contaminated water.  Hopefully we can start determining if they are only making it in the effluent ends (where the copper, zinc and pH are lower) of the treatment cells.  we do catch a lot more of them in minnow traps put at those ends.  One of the most frustrating research we've tried is rearing amphibians from the freshly hatched stage to metamorphosis in some bucket style cages in the wetlands.  Goal is to  compare success in the retention pond, the influent end and effluent ends of the treatment cells.  sounds easy enough but between storms and vertebrate predators flipping buckets and invertebrate predators getting in the buckets no matter how hard we try to  keep them out it has been ridiculously hard.  Gonna try again this fall with some new designs.  Never thought the gene expression work would be easier than rearing amphibians in buckets.  crazy stuff.  Anyway, we at least know these three ranids are reproducing in there.  In the photo you've got recent metamorphs of a bullfrog on top, southern leopard frog on right and green frog on left.  Last week had probably a 100 or so combined coming out of the wetland.

A lizard time of year

To those of you that follow this I am sorry for taking such a long hiatus.  I am hoping to get back in the swing of things and will plan on posting once a week.  Right now most of the drift fences are pretty quiet--no rain and temps in the 90's--not a great combination for amphibians.  But, this time of year we do get to see a lot of lizards.  We've had more Sceloporus than usual showing up in the pit fall traps, a handful of ground skinks, and plenty of Anolis in the buckets but also scurrying all over the fence.  This Thursday and Friday I actually had the pleasure of going out looking for lizards.  Normally I see a few opportunistically, but rarely do I go looking for them.  But, Bryan Falk, a graduate student at AMNH working with Susan Perkins (who I went to grad school with) was in town looking for Anolis and Sceloporus so I got to help him.  He is studying lizard malaria and was looking for some infected animals.  It was nice change of pace for me.  We didn't get any Sceloporus but got a good number of Anolis and saw plenty of skinks....like the broadhead skink, Eumeces laticeps, in the photo.

Other drift fence highlights this week include three ringneck snakes (as in photo) in one bucket--not surprisingly one female and two males that most likely were following the scent of the female and got stuck in the same bucket.  Also got one copperhead juvenile distinguished by it's yellow tail tip.