Salamanders at Kelleys Island

Apologies for the lack of updates. We've been having on-and-off internet (and power!) at Gibraltar recently, but that's life on an island. I've got a big backlog of things to work through, including videos of the fireworks on the 4th viewed from the island (one of the best views available on the lake).

For now, here are some pictures of salamanders you can find on Kelleys Island.

These things are pretty much all over the place. Turning over five or six big, flat rocks can easily uncover an equal number of salamanders. To people familiar with them, this may seem unusual. Salamanders typically begin to burrow to conserve moisture when the summer months come in, but the islands on Lake Erie are basically solid dolomite with a thin layer of soil over it. They can't burrow very deep.

This makes the islands a great place to study salamanders and this particular population has some interesting features. The marbled and red/lead-backed salamanders are fairly typical, neat to look at and play with, but what's really fascinating is the species of salamander from the genus Ambystoma. These salamanders are unisexual (that is, they have gender, but reproduction is possible without gametic combination).

Males deposit sperm and females collect the piles to expose to their eggs. It is not yet understood how, but some eggs combine with sperm in the typical sexual reproductive fashion, others are simply initiated by sperm into growth and development (with no transfer of genetic information). Still others seem capable of "stealing" genetic information of sperm from males of other species, effectively permitting the female to acquire a fully-adapted genome for her offspring within one generation.

While out in the field we collected about twenty individuals to study (along with several red/lead-back salamanders and marbled salamanders who we were not scientifically interested in). Each individual was marked by clipping toes and the clipped tissues were collected and frozen for genetic sequencing. Study of these salamanders may provide insights into various aspects of sexual reproduction, speciation and genetics.

Unfortunately my camera was dying while out in the field and I forgot to bring replacement batteries. Otherwise there would be more photographs of all the salamanders we caught and collected samples from, along with the species we weren't there to sample.