Photo by Nicholas McCarney
As the snow and ice turn to wind and rain, typically cryptic animals become more abundant and prevalent. Before many birds migrate north, before many plants begin to bud, spring is the advent of the amphibians. These animals, although fragile to climate change, pollution, and other anthropomorphic stressors, are surprisingly tolerant to cooler conditions.
For amphibians, just as with many animals, spring is a time for reproduction. In this case, it pays to be quick off the jump. The faster these animals arrive at pools filled with early rains and snowmelt, the more time they have to go through their aquatic larval stages and crawl onto the land before the summer sun and plants soak the precious water back up.
For many frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians, this means crawling long distances to ideal breeding sites. Many times, this means crawling across fragmented habitat paved over by long stretches of asphalt that can make for uncomfortably high mortality rates in these slow moving and fairly defenseless creatures.
Photo by Nicholas McCarney
I’ve recently been able to add salamanders and other amphibians to the list of animals covered under my spatial ecology research, and they’ve quickly risen to the top of the list as far as my favorite animals go. Salamanders are incredibly charismatic little creatures with a lot of diversity, even amongst species within the same genus. That charisma coupled with reclusive and hidden lifestyles makes them an incredibly rewarding study species to work with.
Unfortunately, understanding their reclusive and cryptic lifestyles means understanding their fragility, especially when it comes to road mortality. Picture this: An early spring rain makes for a simultaneously deafening and silent woodland at night. These conditions bring out amphibians in the thousands. A dark stretch of road standing between these tiny animals and the pools they’re migrating to is a gamble they don’t even know they’re taking.
Photo by Nicholas McCarney
Sure, many people watch out for animals on a regular basis, but how often are they looking for anything other than large animals that could damage their vehicles? With increasing development throughout the sensitive habitat these animals require, road mortality is a continuously growing factor of amphibian population decline.
As indicators of healthy ecosystems, amphibians are important clues to contamination, drought, and stress levels of the parts of nature that keep humans healthy. However, quantifying the importance of organisms based on their importance to humans specifically is a bit indulgent. Perhaps understanding and conserving things simply because they have every right to be here as humans do could be enough.
Nicholas McCarney,
Ecologist studying anthropogenic impacts on herpetofauna ecology
Nicholas has prints available at Nature Nerd Nicholas