Perks of Being a Field Biologist: May 2014

Wednesday night was beautiful and incredible for so many reasons. To start off, fireflies (aka lightning bugs). Oh, so many fireflies. And incredibly bright! It looked like some sort of elaborate light show with the tiny bright flashes of light all along the grass and up into the trees. I have never seen fireflies as bright as they are here, most of them also seemed to flash more quickly than I remember, making it all the more magical.
I was not able to get pictures that justify the beauty but I got a few that might give you an idea of just how many there were (Look for the tiny white dots!).

They are there, I promise...

After being dazzled by the lightning bugs, which were living up to their name, and the occasional lightning flash, we went up the mountain for salamander sampling. It was warm and had rained that afternoon, AKA a good night to be a salamander. We saw SO many and a bunch of them were up off the ground! Actually, most of them were. :) See for yourself:

Plethodon juvenile

Some of them looked like they were about to fall off their branches:

Two on the same branch!

Others were perched on leaves:

I can't handle the cuteness in this picture.

At one site there were a bunch of tobacco hornworms (they turn in to large moths) which were bright green! These are closely related to the tomato hornworm, which is a common garden pest.

It was really wonderful to be out when all of the salamanders were out and about. It further excites me to try and figure out exactly when and why they are climbing. Salamanders of many different sizes seemed to be climbing, but I didn't see any of the tiny ones off the ground. Since they would loose water the quickest, this makes sense. Some of them had apparently traveled several feet along branches and tree trunks to get to their perches. I am curious to know how long they stay up there, one of the ones we saw on the trail was gone about an hour later. One of these nights I am going to have to just go out and watch them (with a red light to be less disruptive) to see what they do!

Setting up field sites can be challenging, especially when you are fighting with bushes and downed branches continuously. Oh, and if it is raining. That doesn't help much! In general, being in the field on a rainy night is a good thing. Well, it is if you are studying amphibians because they are more likely to be out and about. :) However, when it is raining during the day and you are trying to set up field sites, it is more frustrating than anything else. We did get to see two salamanders walking about, I suppose they were taking advantage of the rain. One of the reasons salamanders are normally nocturnal (active at night) is to avoid drying out, so they can get additional foraging time by being out in the rain! The mountains and trees did look really beautiful shrouded in mist and we found a small waterfall (very small) at one of the sites!

On the drive to the sites from the field station there were beautiful fields of poppies and daisies!

(I took these pictures on a different day, I did not have my camera out in the rain...)

A couple of days later I continued to set up sampling sites, though this time we started with sites near the field station for the bulk of my thesis work. It was a beautiful sunny day and things went smoothly. We saw a few fun things while we were out an about. I almost stepped on a small rabbit! I just didn't see it until I was quite close:

We also heard and caught a glimpse of a Black-and-white warbler (it moved too much for me to get a good picture). On the way back to the field station, we stopped by the stream and flipped over a couple of mossy rocks and logs, to see what we could turn up. Saw this large mushroom! There is an incredible fungal diversity in the Appalachian mountains, but I still don't know how to identify many mushrooms...extra summer goal? (If only there were a few more hours in the day...)

We found this vibrant and well fed eft!

This little salamander is the terrestrial juvenile stage of Eastern Red-spotted Newts (Notophthalmus viridescens). Newts have a very interesting 3 phase life history. First, they start out being aquatic and have gills as many salamanders do (the larval stage). Then they metamorphose into the eft stage (pictured above) and live on land for a few years. Finally they transform back to an aquatic form (no gills this time) as adults. The adults are typically a more drab olive color, but they will retain the red spots on their back.

While we were walking around, we also saw some butterflies,

lots of pink trilliums,

and a couple other flowers:

Iris

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

That evening, we decided to go out to the sites we set up earlier that day just to see about how many salamanders we might see on the surveys (and for fun-zies, let's be honest.). I am really glad we went, because we found some of the prettiest salamanders I have ever seen. See for yourself:

All of the above salamanders are Ocoee salamanders (Desmognathus ocoee). These salamanders have highly variable color patterns and we also found several darkly colored ones (but those were less fun to photograph). The last one was especially beautiful with the cheek coloration. The first one has both red (orange really) cheeks and some red coloration on the legs. This is thought to be mimicry of the red-legged (Plethodon shermani) and red-cheeked (Plethodon jordani) salamanders. These salamanders produce a very sticky slime when provoked, that is a bit like superglue and can cover the potential predator in leaves and dirt that wont come off for days (I would know... I have been slimed on many occasion!) The red-legged salamanders do occur in this same region, but the red-cheeked salamanders only live in the Great Smokey Mountains. So the reason for red-cheeked Ocoee salamanders in the Nantahala National Forest remains a bit of a mystery.

We saw a few interesting fungi and a cool flower too!

We saw a few other species of salamanders:

Plethodon Hybrid

Seal salamander face (Desmognathus monticola)

Huge Black-bellied salamander in a log

The above Black-bellied salamander (Desmognathus quadramaculatus) was sticking its head out of a hole in a log next to a stream. This was possibly the largest black-belly I have ever seen! He shied away from the flash of our cameras and retreated into his log.
Then I saw this American toad by the dorms:

The next day we set up a few more sites:

While wandering about the mountainside, we saw some cool flowers,

Trillium

May-apple blossom

a Dark-eyed Junco, and a wild turkey (not pictured). The Dark-eyed Junco was easily distinguished by a flash of white feathers on the tail during flight.

That night we started the monthly surveys for Plethodon hybrids. This involves walking around a predetermined area at night and catching salamanders we see walking around on the leaf litter. The first night was pouring rain, but we still caught 67 Plethodon salamanders, and saw lots of Ocoee salamanders (many were climbing on trees!). We also saw a couple of large Black-bellied salamanders wandering on plot. These are more typically found in and on the edges of the streams, but the rain had them out and about. When we were putting the salamanders back at the plots we saw an owl fly away from the road (by this time the rain had slowed down). The second night we heard at least two Barred Owls (we think) calling to each other and saw this especially pretty luna moth: