Where are the salamanders hanging out?

Answering that question has been Jake Kushner’s mission — especially in the face of a proposed project by an energy company that will lay a transmission line right through areas where these amphibians are thought to move.

“The salamanders are only documented using a small area around vernal pools after they’re done breeding,” Kushner, reptile and amphibian specialist at South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center in New York, told Mongabay in a video interview. “But we believe these salamanders use much larger areas around the ponds.”

For want of concrete data to back up his observation, Kushner turned to radio telemetry. Now, just a year and a half into his fieldwork, Kushner said he’s been surprised by how much he’s discovered about the animals’ movements in Long Pond Green Belt Nature Reserve in the Hamptons in New York.

Tiger salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) are what’s known as an indicator species, one whose presence indicates how the ecosystem is faring. Since they breathe through their skin, even low levels of pollution can impact their health. “The declines or booms in their populations can tell us a lot about the health of the environment because they’re very sensitive to things like pollution,” Kushner said.

The salamanders spend most of their time in burrows underground. They emerge during the spring season and move to vernal pools — depressions in the ground that fill up with rainwater and melted snow for part of the year — where they lay their eggs. The pools serve as a breeding ground where the larvae develop and undergo metamorphosis. Come summer, the salamanders scurry back underground, where they remain until the next breeding season.

However, their underground lifestyle makes it a challenge for scientists to keep track of their movements. While transmitters have been deployed to track small animals, the tiger salamander’s burrowing lifestyle means that anything attached to its body risks getting rubbed off and eventually removed.

So Kushner decided to deploy radio transmitters. He used minnow traps to capture male salamanders as they traveled to the pools. He and his team would then put the animal under anesthesia, make a small incision near its stomach, and surgically implant a transmitter. After five days of observation to ensure the salamander was alright, they released it.

That’s when the tracking process begins.

With an antenna in hand, Kushner heads out twice every week, walking around to pick up signals from the transmitters. “Each transmitter produces a unique radio frequency,” he said. “I use a radio receiver to dial into a specific frequency for each salamander.”

The intensity of the beeping tells Kushner if he’s moving in the right direction. As he gets closer, the beep gets louder. “We found that I am able to get within 3 to 5 feet [1-1.5 meters] of the salamander’s actual location,” he said. “That is pretty precise for our purpose because we are looking to see how far they are moving, and what habitats around the pond they are using.”

After having gathered data last year, Kushner is now in the middle of a second season of data gathering. He said he plans to continue it next year as well. During the analysis process, he will focus on finding the home ranges of the salamanders and calculating the percentage use of the zones around the pool to get an idea of what areas the animals use the most. “If we can document them using different habitats than what we’ve documented before, it’s something we can use to protect them and those habitats,” Kushner said.

Even the preliminary data analysis has thrown up surprises.

For one, Kushner said he’s found salamanders moved longer distances, several hundred meters, from the ponds than had been previously observed. Additionally, he also found that a lot of salamanders use burrows in the middle of fields, something which hadn’t been documented before. “Most of the literature says that these salamanders use pine and oak forests,” Kushner said. “We can now probably add fields to the habitats associated with these animals.”

Kusher said he hopes the final data can be used to inform management guidelines by state and local officials. The data, he said, could potentially be taken into consideration to enforce buffer zones around ponds that shouldn’t be used for development or infrastructure projects.

“I would like to make simplified maps so they can visually see and have numbers about how far these guys are going,” he said.

Banner image: Tiger salamanders are what’s known as an indicator species, one whose presence indicates how the ecosystem is faring. Image by Peter Paplanus via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.

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