Every March or early April, when the ground begins to thaw, spotted salamanders, a common but rarely seen amphibian, leave their underground burrows and begin their migration to the small, fish-free ponds and vernal pools they use as breeding grounds.
Black with bright yellow spots running in two uneven lines down their backs, the spotted salamander can reach up to 7.5 inches in length and live for around 20 years in the wild. Yet as human development pushes further and further into natural lands, spotted salamanders, as with many other species, have had their environment in many areas encroached on, or even eliminated.
Faced with this problem, for many years the Mashantucket Pequot Natural Resources Protection Department (MPNRPD) has been assisting in the migration of the spotted salamanders inside of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal reservation. A well-traveled road, Pequot Trail, cuts right across the migration route of the salamanders.
Carried out mainly by Shelley Spohr and Becky Foster, both of the MPNRPD, the amphibian migration assistance initiative always takes place on rainy nights in early spring/late winter when the salamanders can move aboveground and out of water for hours without dehydrating. Spohr briefly explained the salamanders’ migration.
“They live part of the year in the uplands in tiny shrew tunnels or vole tunnels,” Spohr said, “and then every spring they come down to the vernal pools to reproduce. As soon as they’re done laying their eggs, they go back into the uplands.”
Acting as wildlife crossing guards, Spohr, Foster, and a few others continuously walk up and down Pequot Trail during the migration, carrying all crossing salamanders off the road and closer to their breeding grounds.
The migration typically will last only a few nights, as the salamanders need only to travel about a fifth of a mile at most, but if weather doesn’t allow, the migration may be sporadic, with as much as a week or two between mass movements.
Not many people would volunteer their time to help amphibians cross the road, but, as Spohr explained, the spotted salamander is an important part of the local ecosystem.
“From an ecological perspective, they are really important in the food chain,” Spohr said. “For instance, there is a tiny salamander called a red-back salamander, and I’ve read some studies that say that biomass-wise, there are more red-back salamanders than any other species in an acre of New England forest. So if you piled all of them up they would outweigh any species of mammal, bird, reptile—anything. Most people just don’t know or aren’t aware of how important they are in the whole food chain.”
Foster commented on how this year’s migration is more challenging than most, as the first wave of salamanders began on Friday and Saturday, March 7 and 8, weekend nights with high traffic. The next wave was expected on March 14. Yet even with less than ideal conditions, around 60 salamanders were saved, versus the 25 that were found dead.
Many more years of study are needed to assess the stability of the overall population, and Spohr and Foster continue to look for volunteers to help out, something Spohr thinks people would find very rewarding.
“Just from the human side of it I think people think it’s really exciting to see all these animals just mass-migrating across the road that normally they would never see at any other time during the year,” Spohr said. “A lot of people don’t even know these things are out there.”