Tag: Florida

Jumping Spider

I came across this spider years ago, while looking for salamanders (which is how I found most of the animals shown on this blog). It was on the silt fence, and when I held the camera up close to it, the spider kept running toward it. Reminds me of the way my cat approaches strange dogs — fluffed up and growling, but too curious not to approach and sniff the dog.

The constant motion made it very hard to get a clear photo.  When I got around to uploading them from the camera, there were twenty very blurred pictures, and this one.

Six-Lined Racerunner

These pretty little lizards were the fastest-moving thing on the ground in the Florida sandhills. I saw them every day, but I never managed to get a photo of one in situ. I caught this one in a snake trap and snapped this shot just before letting it go. Look at those crazy long toes!

The six-lined racerunner is a type of whiptail lizard, the only one found in the east. There are more in the southwest. You might have heard of those; they’re known for a very interesting trait. Some populations of whiptail lizards are all female. They reproduce by parthenogenesis. No males required!

This is not the same thing as the asexual reproduction you see in plants, where a part of an organism is broken off and an entirely new one grows from it. That’s cloning, in which the offspring and the parent have the same set of chromosomes. In parthenogenesis, no new DNA is introduced, but the existing chromosomes still go through meiosis, so the offspring are not genetically identical to the parent. And, honestly, my several attempts at a paragraph explaining how that works only reminded me that it’s been a long time since I took a genetics class, so I’ll do us all a favor and just point you to Wikipedia’s entry on parthenogenesis.

We tend to think of only plants and some invertebrates as reproducing asexually, but it’s more common in vertebrates than you might have thought. Some of the other species it’s been documented in include hammerhead sharks, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, and domestic turkeys. While looking for examples, I discovered that I’m already familiar with some local snakes capable of parthenogenesis: the cottonmouth and copperhead — a 2012 study found genetic evidence in both species! No matter how you feel about venomous snakes, that is pretty damned cool.

Eastern Coral Snake

Last week, I posted a scarlet snake and compared it to the similar-looking coral snake. Here’s what a real coral snake looks like. The most visible differences: the nose is black, and the red and yellow bands touch. People in parts of the US where this snake lives (and sometimes where it doesn’t!) grow up hearing this rhyme:

Red and yellow, kill a fellow.
Red and black, friend of Jack.

There are variations — a more sensical one ends “poison lack” — but the one above is the one I learned as a child in West Virginia, which is well outside of the coral snake’s range. Where my parents, who came from Pennsylvania, learned it is anyone’s guess.

The black head is less definitive — some kingsnakes have black heads. But the red and yellow bands still don’t touch.

Coral snakes are venomous, but they’re not closely related to the other venomous snakes in North America, the pit vipers (rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, and copperheads). They have a different type of venom, and they don’t have the big front fangs the pit vipers do. And unlike pit vipers, coral snakes lay eggs.

Their venom is very toxic, but they’re not much of a threat to humans. Their small fangs are not very good for injecting venom, so they don’t just strike and let go like a rattlesnake. They hold on and chew, and the only time that’s likely to happen is if you pick them up. I don’t recommend picking them up. Or standing on them while wearing flip-flops. Otherwise, you can safely watch them from a few feet away.

This species lives in the southeast coastal plain, from eastern NC south to FL and then west around the Gulf of Mexico. Other species live further south, but they don’t have the same pattern. If you’re outside the US, don’t trust the “red and yellow” rule!

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Eastern Coral Snake (Micrurus fulvius)

So here’s a question for readers: If you live somewhere with venomous and non-venomous animals that look similar, what tricks do you use to quickly identify which are dangerous?

(Correction: I had stated that there was only one species of coral snake in the US. That’s wrong, there are others in the Southwest. This is just the only coral snake species in the Eastern United States.)

Scarlet Snake

This is a scarlet snake. It’s easily mistaken for either a scarlet kingsnake or a coral snake, but you can tell it’s neither by the fact that the bands of red and black are only on the snake’s back. The belly is white. Coral snakes and scarlet kingsnakes have bands that go all the way around the body.

Scarlet snakes live in the southeast and as far west as Oklahoma and Texas. They eat mostly small rodents and reptiles, and reptile eggs. A large adult might get up to two feet long.

That pointy head helps them burrow into sand. The head always starts with red at the nose, unlike coral snakes, which start with black. (The “red touch yellow, kill a fellow” rule is good only in the US. If you go to Central America, the coral snakes are a lot less standardized.)

scarletsnake

Eastern Spadefoot

Here’s an eastern spadefoot, a medium-sized frog that is relatively common but rarely seen unless you happen to be trapping amphibians around an ephemeral pond. They’re burrowers, so they need loose, sandy soil that’s easy to dig into. They dig with their hind feet, backwards.

The adults are rarely seen in daylight. They usually only come out of their burrows at night to catch bugs, earthworms, and slugs. But you can sometimes find hundreds of tiny recently-metamorphosed spadefoots leaving a pond during the day.

The easiest way to tell them from true toads (the Bufo genus — around here that would be the Fowler’s toad and the American toad) is their eyes — their pupils are vertical instead of round. They also have two curved yellow streaks on their backs.

Also, they try to curl up into a ball when threatened. I’m not sure what threat would be deterred by this — definitely not a human — but it is adorable.

Arachnophobes, avert your eyes

I recently lost a large chunk of the contents of my hard drive, including many of the photos I intended to use for this blog.  Most of them still exist, scattered over an old hard drive, several thumb drives, and at least three camera cards. My files were backed up, but not organized.

I’ve been slowly going through them all, occasionally finding something I forgot I had. Like this video version of the Spider vs. Anole photo!

 

 

This is probably the worst photo I will ever post. And the best.

Most of my wildlife photos came from one job. That job, in spite of allowing me a lot of time and access to wander around taking pictures, did have a goal: to find and document flatwoods salamanders on two state forests.

It had recently been discovered that the flatwoods salamander is actually two species, so recently that the current Petersen Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians still lists them as one species: Ambystoma cingulatum. A few years before I started the job, the populations west of the Apalachicola River were declared a separate species, the reticulated flatwoods salamander (Ambystoma bishopi). They were already rare as one species; this little offshoot was extremely rare. There were only about 36 known ponds where they had been found, and at many of those, none had been seen in years.

Flatwoods salamanders have a clever but risky reproductive strategy, which in rainy years gives them a big advantage, but in dry years means complete failure. They rely on the cold fronts that come through the Florida panhandle, bringing rain more or less regularly throughout the fall and winter.

On rainy nights in late fall, flatwoods salamanders come out of their burrows and make their way to ephemeral ponds, which are just shallow depressions in the woods. These aren’t really ponds yet, but they will be, if the rain keeps coming. Flatwoods salamanders lay their eggs before the ponds fill. This gives them a head start, so by the time other salamanders and dragonfly larvae are swimming around, the flatwoods salamanders are too big for them to eat.

Salamander eggs have no shells. They need a thick cover of grass and weeds to protect them from desiccation. So there’s another thing they need for good habitat: plants need sunlight. Which means the forest canopy can’t be completely closed, and the shrubs and small trees can’t be too thick. Luckily, the natural state of pine forests in Florida is open and grassy.

Florida’s ecosystems evolved with frequent fires, started by both lightning and humans. As a result, outside of wetlands, the natural plant life is either tolerant of or actually dependent on fire. The major tree of the uplands is the longleaf pine, a tree that is perfectly adapted to fire, as long as the fire is near the ground. It’s also adapted to keep fire on the ground: there are no low branches to help the flames spread up to the crown, and the mature trees are naturally spaced far apart, so even if one is engulfed, the ones around it won’t burn, too. This has the bonus effect of letting sunlight reach the ground, which lets plenty of (fire-tolerant) grass grow, which lets the fire spread out along the ground and kill the competition.

Unfortunately, very little of the forest is still in its natural state. The problem with much of it, and this will sound ridiculous when talking about a forest, is that it has too many trees. Not enough sunlight reaches the ground for grass to grow, and animals that depend on the grass have nowhere to hide or nothing to eat.

I sought out the grassiest, most open ponds, but in four years of trying, I never found a flatwoods salamander on the forests I surveyed. Three of the four winters were too dry for many of the ponds to fill in the first place, and those that did dried within a few weeks. Not long enough for a salamander to go from egg to adult. I did catch other animals: mole and dwarf salamanders; newts; cricket, leopard, little grass, and ornate chorus frogs; Southern and oak toads, Eastern spadefoots; garter snakes and pigmy rattlesnakes. At the end of every season, I would start out my report by stating that I had not found any flatwoods salamanders, and then describing all the animals I did find.

Even though it was fun, it was also kind of depressing. How many drought years in a row could a population survive? Was I just missing them, or were they just not there? Were they extinct on both my sites? I’d asked my counterparts on other sites if they had found any, and they had not. Had the reticulated flatwoods salamander gone extinct almost as soon as it was discovered?

One rainy night, I was asked to help set traps around a little pond on Eglin Air Force Base. This was the pond where the last known reticulated flatwoods salamanders had been caught. But the previous fall had been another drought year, and the researchers there had had no luck. Still, if there were flatwoods salamanders in the area, this was the best chance I had to see one. I drove out there after work, met the young grad student who was trapping them.

Drift fence, partially encircling a pond.
Drift fence, partially encircling a pond. The traps are hung up when not in use.

Their methods were different from ours. We had partially circled 20 ponds with our fences, and along each fence we placed six traps: on each side, one at each end and one in the center. On non-trapping nights, an animal could just follow the fence to the end and then be on its way. We could leave our partial fences up all season, but this meant we only ever caught the fraction of animals that ran into the fence on their way in or out of the pond.

Because these researchers had only one pond to deal with, they completely surrounded it with a silt fence, leaving gaps here and there that they closed on trapping nights. They had dozens of traps along this fence. This meant we would catch every single animal coming in or out of the pond. If salamanders were moving tonight, we would catch them. The student and I closed up the gaps and set our traps along it in the rain. Then we waited an hour in the truck.

After an hour we went and checked them. We only had a cricket frog. I shook it out of the trap on the other side of the fence. We went back to the truck and sat and waited some more.

The second time around, I picked up my first trap and saw something dark moving in the corner. I maneuvered it around and finally just reached in and took it out.

It looked a bit like the mole salamanders I’d been catching all this time, but not enough to mistake it for one. Longer, thinner, with net-like markings instead of dots. And slippery! I almost dropped it before the grad student could get out his ruler and measure it.

The next trap had one, too. And the next. We caught more than twenty that night. Not only were they not extinct, but it looked like there were enough to keep the population alive at least another year.

My photo is blurry, because it was dark and raining and the salamander was slimy. But, look: Ambystoma bishopi lives!

Little Grass Frog

In the comments for last week’s cricket frog post, I mentioned that the cricket frog was not the smallest frog in Florida. Then, I completely neglected to say what the smallest frog was. So, here it is: the little grass frog. It’s related to the spring peeper, in the Pseudacris genus.

They are tiny. The frog pictured above is sitting on my raincoat, which doesn’t really give a good sense of scale. Here’s one on a square of ordinary velcro, and one on the palm of my hand:

Little grass frog, on velcro.
Little grass frog, on hand.

The little grass frog is another amphibian that breeds in ephemeral ponds, as well as other grassy-edged bodies of water.  I’ve only ever seen two, and I spent a great deal of time in their habitat.

It’s not particularly rare; it’s just very hard to see. Put this little guy in some dead grass, and he would disappear. These, like literally hundreds of mole salamanders, ornate chorus frogs, and leopard frogs, were captured in an attempt to catch flatwoods salamanders (more about those next week). I’ve never seen one just hopping around on the ground. If you do, what luck! Take a picture. Preferably with an object for scale, because nobody will comprehend just how tiny it is without one.