Movin' On Up (audio)
Laura England | December 2018
My kids and I are obsessed with turning over rocks in creeks. Most of the time we find larval forms of mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, water pennies and other aquatic insects characteristic of the relatively clean mountain streams that we’re so fortunate to have all around us. We especially enjoy exploring tiny headwaters because of the potential to find salamanders.
In the woods behind our house, there’s a seep of groundwater that comes out of the hillside in a cove and flows downhill in what is just the hint of a channel. It is one of millions of “zero-order” streams that collectively are the birthplace of rivers. Our tiny stream eventually it makes its way to Dutch Creek, which empties into the Watauga River down in the heart of our valley. While zero-order streams are not big enough to show up on maps, their importance on the ground is hard to overestimate. The land-water interactions that take place within, alongside and underneath headwater streams are responsible for much of the cleansing and processing in watersheds that ensures healthy rivers downstream. And headwaters are also unique habitats, supporting large numbers of aquatic, terrestrial, and amphibious species.
One late spring afternoon, my then five-year-old daughter Celia and I decide to visit our tiny stream. We put on our old shoes, grab a bucket and head up the ridge. Jake and Sally, our black-lab-mix duo, zoom past us, double back, and zoom past again, showing us the way and urging us to pick up the pace. We enter the shade of the forest. It’s secondary forest—a few decades ago it was cattle pasture—with a canopy largely made of white pine, tulip poplar, black locust, black cherry and striped maple. There is also a patch of black walnut trees with an understory completely different from the rest of the forest, bearing witness to the allelopathic chemicals that black walnut roots exude to discourage competitors. Waist-high wingstem, an aster with yellow flowers and flaps on the stems that resemble wings, thrives under the otherwise poisonous walnut trees.
We make our way down to the stream and start carefully lifting rocks, searching for lightning-fast wiggles, the telltale sign that we have found a salamander. “I found a dusky,” Celia exclaims with delight and confidence. She learned months ago that she can identify duskies by the light-colored line running from their eyes to the base of their jaws. Duskies are salamanders in the genus Desmognathus. A herpetologist colleague told me there are several species of this genus up here—the Carolina mountain dusky salamander, the Ocoee salamander, and the Blue Ridge dusky salamander—making up a Desmognathus species complex that includes dusky hybrids at some locations.
In a matter of minutes, we collect seven duskies of varying size in our bucket. “That one’s a mommy salamander and that one’s a baby,” Celia notes. The next rock she turns over catches us both by surprise. We see a flash of gold. With gentle but quick motions, I capture the novel salamander and put it in our bucket. It is mostly golden with two black stripes running from its eyes to its tail and a bunch of black spots in between. Celia asks what kind it is and I acknowledge that I do not know. Of course, I did not bring my phone on this outing, so we both take a good look and a mental picture and then we release all of our salamanders back into their stream.
Back at the house we scour the internet for reliable sources of photos and information on amphibians—there are many. Celia and I confidently identify our new salamander friend as a Southern Two-lined Salamander. We’re pretty excited until we see the range map—it shows this species as inhabiting the entire southeast except for southern Florida and the southern Appalachians. “It’s not supposed to be here,” I explain to Celia, “we’re too high up here in the mountains.” “I know why it’s here,” she says, “it’s here because of warming.” The ecologist in me beams with pride witnessing my kindergartner making important global to local connections. She is already developing ecological thinking as a habit of mind, even at this young age. But then the mother in me is horrified, devastated, as the realization sinks in that climate change already and always will permeate her reality. The same is true for my eight-year-old son and all the children of their generation. And for all the children of all species, including the Southern Two-lined Salamander.
Thousands of cases of climate-induced range shifts have been documented. With warming temperatures, species that can move shift to higher latitudes or elevations to track shifts in the location of their suitable habitat. But high elevation species are adapted to “islands in the sky”—habitat found only at the tops of mountains. These islands of suitable habitat shrink and ultimately disappear as temperatures warm. Though mountaintop species are far from sea level, unlike the residents of actual islands, ironically they are still being drowned out by the effects of global warming.
Scientists have long predicted the threat of climate change to high elevation species. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the latest example of this threat by documenting population and range dynamics for birds native to the Peruvian Andes. The researchers documented the disappearance of eight “ridgetop specialist” species between 1985 and 2017. Those birds, in the words of the study authors, took an “escalator to extinction.”
High elevation species struggle with warming not only because their suitable habitat shrinks, but also because of the appearance of new competitors. Lower elevation species, too, are “movin’ on up” as the planet warms, creating entirely novel communities as they encroach on the habitat of species they previously never overlapped with. Enter the Southern Two-lined Salamander.
Herpetologists have documented the important role of temperature as one of the key factors driving stream salamander abundance and microhabitat use in southern Appalachian forests. So it is logical to expect that our local salamanders are subject to the threat of climate-induced range shifts too. I can only feel dread as I think about finding a Southern Two-lined Salamander in our stream, and worry that our mountain salamanders are already aboard an escalator to extinction.
Laura England | December 2018
My kids and I are obsessed with turning over rocks in creeks. Most of the time we find larval forms of mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, water pennies and other aquatic insects characteristic of the relatively clean mountain streams that we’re so fortunate to have all around us. We especially enjoy exploring tiny headwaters because of the potential to find salamanders.
In the woods behind our house, there’s a seep of groundwater that comes out of the hillside in a cove and flows downhill in what is just the hint of a channel. It is one of millions of “zero-order” streams that collectively are the birthplace of rivers. Our tiny stream eventually it makes its way to Dutch Creek, which empties into the Watauga River down in the heart of our valley. While zero-order streams are not big enough to show up on maps, their importance on the ground is hard to overestimate. The land-water interactions that take place within, alongside and underneath headwater streams are responsible for much of the cleansing and processing in watersheds that ensures healthy rivers downstream. And headwaters are also unique habitats, supporting large numbers of aquatic, terrestrial, and amphibious species.
One late spring afternoon, my then five-year-old daughter Celia and I decide to visit our tiny stream. We put on our old shoes, grab a bucket and head up the ridge. Jake and Sally, our black-lab-mix duo, zoom past us, double back, and zoom past again, showing us the way and urging us to pick up the pace. We enter the shade of the forest. It’s secondary forest—a few decades ago it was cattle pasture—with a canopy largely made of white pine, tulip poplar, black locust, black cherry and striped maple. There is also a patch of black walnut trees with an understory completely different from the rest of the forest, bearing witness to the allelopathic chemicals that black walnut roots exude to discourage competitors. Waist-high wingstem, an aster with yellow flowers and flaps on the stems that resemble wings, thrives under the otherwise poisonous walnut trees.
We make our way down to the stream and start carefully lifting rocks, searching for lightning-fast wiggles, the telltale sign that we have found a salamander. “I found a dusky,” Celia exclaims with delight and confidence. She learned months ago that she can identify duskies by the light-colored line running from their eyes to the base of their jaws. Duskies are salamanders in the genus Desmognathus. A herpetologist colleague told me there are several species of this genus up here—the Carolina mountain dusky salamander, the Ocoee salamander, and the Blue Ridge dusky salamander—making up a Desmognathus species complex that includes dusky hybrids at some locations.
In a matter of minutes, we collect seven duskies of varying size in our bucket. “That one’s a mommy salamander and that one’s a baby,” Celia notes. The next rock she turns over catches us both by surprise. We see a flash of gold. With gentle but quick motions, I capture the novel salamander and put it in our bucket. It is mostly golden with two black stripes running from its eyes to its tail and a bunch of black spots in between. Celia asks what kind it is and I acknowledge that I do not know. Of course, I did not bring my phone on this outing, so we both take a good look and a mental picture and then we release all of our salamanders back into their stream.
Back at the house we scour the internet for reliable sources of photos and information on amphibians—there are many. Celia and I confidently identify our new salamander friend as a Southern Two-lined Salamander. We’re pretty excited until we see the range map—it shows this species as inhabiting the entire southeast except for southern Florida and the southern Appalachians. “It’s not supposed to be here,” I explain to Celia, “we’re too high up here in the mountains.” “I know why it’s here,” she says, “it’s here because of warming.” The ecologist in me beams with pride witnessing my kindergartner making important global to local connections. She is already developing ecological thinking as a habit of mind, even at this young age. But then the mother in me is horrified, devastated, as the realization sinks in that climate change already and always will permeate her reality. The same is true for my eight-year-old son and all the children of their generation. And for all the children of all species, including the Southern Two-lined Salamander.
Thousands of cases of climate-induced range shifts have been documented. With warming temperatures, species that can move shift to higher latitudes or elevations to track shifts in the location of their suitable habitat. But high elevation species are adapted to “islands in the sky”—habitat found only at the tops of mountains. These islands of suitable habitat shrink and ultimately disappear as temperatures warm. Though mountaintop species are far from sea level, unlike the residents of actual islands, ironically they are still being drowned out by the effects of global warming.
Scientists have long predicted the threat of climate change to high elevation species. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the latest example of this threat by documenting population and range dynamics for birds native to the Peruvian Andes. The researchers documented the disappearance of eight “ridgetop specialist” species between 1985 and 2017. Those birds, in the words of the study authors, took an “escalator to extinction.”
High elevation species struggle with warming not only because their suitable habitat shrinks, but also because of the appearance of new competitors. Lower elevation species, too, are “movin’ on up” as the planet warms, creating entirely novel communities as they encroach on the habitat of species they previously never overlapped with. Enter the Southern Two-lined Salamander.
Herpetologists have documented the important role of temperature as one of the key factors driving stream salamander abundance and microhabitat use in southern Appalachian forests. So it is logical to expect that our local salamanders are subject to the threat of climate-induced range shifts too. I can only feel dread as I think about finding a Southern Two-lined Salamander in our stream, and worry that our mountain salamanders are already aboard an escalator to extinction.