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November 1997
It was five o'clock in the morning and very
dark. We had just started our
morning walk when my husband Bill stopped under the streetlight and began
looking at a point on the sidewalk from different angles.
"What are you doing?" I
asked, not having a clue.
"There's a salamander on the sidewalk, I think,” he said.
“It looked like a stick, but something caught my eye."
In the strange glow of the streetlight, I knelt in the street, my hands
on the curb. I had to put my face quite close to see it clearly.
The salamander was dark and about 6 inches long.
Its head was up and alert. It
was aware of us!
As we continued on our walk, we wondered what it was doing in the
seemingly inhospitable surroundings of sidewalk, street and closely mown lawns
with no cover. Most likely it was
looking for a place to hibernate. On the way back, we stopped to see if the
salamander was still there. It had
moved into the road and morning traffic was beginning.
Now, our general rule is not to interfere with anything wild, trusting it
best takes care of itself. I
struggled with myself, and decided that this situation justified doing
something. I suggested we look up
salamanders to see what kind of habitat this one preferred, but Bill said we'd
be too late to the rescue if we delayed. I
ran to get a jar. It moved away
when we first tried to capture it, its body undulating rapidly along the
blacktop as though swimming in water. I could see car headlights approaching
from both directions, so we had to act fast.
I flipped the salamander into the jar, and we went home.
I wanted to release it immediately, so we went to what I thought was the
best place, in the backyard near the brush pile, with lots of dead leaves, a
small seasonal stream and spring, a stone wall and no roads nearby.
We left the jar on its side and went to get ready for work.
A few minutes later I went out with a flashlight.
The salamander was still in the jar.
While I drank coffee, I looked through The
Amphibians and Reptiles of Maine, Bulletin 838 from the Maine Agricultural
Experiment Station of the University of Maine.
I discovered, from the many descriptions and illustrations, that what we
had found was a hybrid of the blue-spotted salamander and the Jefferson
salamander. The hybrids are
brownish and larger than the blue-spotted salamanders, being up to 6.8 inches.
The tail is long, about 44% of the body length.
The head, while narrow, tapers to a rounded snout.
In the poor light we had, it was the over-all length, the proportion of
the tail length to the body, the dark colour, and the rounded snout that we were
able to observe.
Except during breeding season, blue-spotted salamanders and the hybrids
live in wooded areas where they find shelter under rocks, rotting stumps and
logs, vegetative debris or loose soil. They prefer the damp, moderately shaded
habitats found in deciduous or mixed forests. People sometimes find them in
their cellars in autumn. These salamanders eat larval and adult insects,
spiders, centipedes, earthworms, slugs, and snails. We had released the
salamander in just the right environment!
In April the blue-spotted salamanders and the hybrids migrate to breeding
pools which are semi-permanent with overhanging bushes and grass, sphagnum moss
margins and leafy bottoms. They
also use highway ditches and flooded sections of logging roads.
Water depth in these pools is 12 to 15 inches.
After metamorphosing from the larval stage in the pools, the newly
transformed juvenile salamanders migrate in large numbers to terrestrial habitat
on rainy late summer nights.
Reading this, I felt quite privileged to glimpse this elusive creature.
It was light now, and I checked the jar once more before leaving for
work. The salamander was gone.
I wished it well, and took the jar back into the house.
The way in which these hybrid salamanders came into being goes back to
the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. The
blue-spotted and Jefferson salamanders evolved from a common ancestor, when two
populations were separated by glaciers and developed as two distinct species.
When the glaciers melted, the two species met and interbred, resulting in
the hybrids.
Next door, my neighbors often find a spotted salamander during the summer when they lift a log at the edge of their garden. Spotted salamanders are gray brown to blue black with bright yellow or orange spots in two irregular rows down the length of their bodies. They migrate, sometimes as far as 420 feet, to breed in the pools where they themselves were born. They spend one or two weeks in the pool where they mate and then return to their usual haunts under leaves, rotting wood, stones or in underground burrows. Spotted salamanders are nocturnal and hibernate in winter.
Amphibians, which include salamanders, were the first vertebrates to
leave water to live on land, about 360 million years ago.
Competition from the reptiles, birds, and mammals that then evolved has
limited their success. Of
amphibians, there are now only toads and frogs, salamanders, and caecilians,
which are worm-like creatures found in the tropics.
Most species of amphibians must return to water, or a very moist
environment, to breed. They need
moist habitats, such as underground or in wetlands, or they are active only at
night, like the spotted salamander. Amphibians
are fascinating creatures, and while we do not know enough about them to set a
value on them from our perspective, we can surely accept they have value in
themselves.
By Nancy Coverstone (ncstone@umext.maine.edu), University of Maine Extension Educator in Androscoggin and Sagadahoc Counties
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