wes_von_papineäu
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PRESS-REGISTER (Mobile, Alabama) 17 June 08 Scientists study rare salamander in hopes of protecting it from man (Ben Raines)
It is fishing in its most bizarre form, conducted deep in the woods with no water in sight.
Armed with hooks so small they might have been crafted by fairies and fishing line as fine as a baby's hair, J.J. Apodaca lets the live cricket on his hook do all the work.
Set outside the quarry's subterranean burrow at dusk, the poor cricket sees the tiny cave as a good hiding place and unwittingly marches in toward its doom.
The take is swift. Six inches of 2-pound test fishing line goes taut and the short fight is on.
It ends with Apodaca holding one of America's rarest creatures, a Red Hills salamander, this one with a number 16 barbless hook hanging from its jaw. The salamander is 10 inches long, its moist skin purple like a wet bruise and gleaming in the light of a setting sun. The entrance to the burrow it was plucked from was so small it could be plugged with a marble.
"If I'm dead sold that one of the holes is a burrow, then I'll let a cricket go down the hole," Apodaca said. "The salamander usually hits the cricket pretty hard."
Apodaca is a graduate student at the University of Alabama studying the genetics of the salamander under a state grant. He is one of the few scientists allowed to catch and handle them. Anyone else caught disturbing or killing the animals could be hit with a $100,000 fine.
Clinging stubbornly to a lonely existence in the deep hollows of Alabama's Red Hills, the official state amphibian lives nowhere else. It is hemmed in to its narrow range between the Conecuh and Alabama rivers by a series of evolutionary quirks that tie it so completely to these hills that it could not survive outside of them, even for a moment.
In fact, the animals can barely survive outside of their burrows, their tiny legs almost useless when it comes to walking around on the forest floor. The creature's skull is twice as thick as most salamanders and is used as a shovel to help dig the tunnels it spends its life in. Its tail is prehensile like a monkey's, allowing the animal to hold tight to underground roots inside its burrow, possibly helping protect it from raccoons that might try to pull them out and gobble them up.
The animal caught by Apodaca was 10 inches long and perhaps 8 or 9 years old, he said. He took pains to keep its body moist as the salamanders have no lungs and do all their breathing through their skin.
Federal officials have classed the salamander as "threatened" for decades, with just a fraction of 1 percent of its home range — about 150 acres — protected by state or federal agencies. A large, illegal and growing garbage dump sits on that protected land, about 100 yards from where Apodaca caught a large female Wednesday. The other 99 percent of suitable habitat is being whittled away bit by bit, day by day, threatening the creatures' very survival.
Most recently, the Alabama Department of Transportation ordered the removal of more than 100 salamanders from a hillside to make way for a truck passing lane on a hill along Alabama 21, though those animals may have represented but a fraction of the total living on that hillside. After the project fell through partly because of concerns about the salamander population, transportation officials said, the animals were returned to the hillside homes they were plucked from. When all was said and done, two of the animals had died, essentially for no reason at all.
Now, transportation officials are talking about starting the project, and perhaps the relocation effort, all over again. If possible, the road's route will be altered to avoid the salamanders, transportation officials said Friday.
The majority of the salamander's range is owned by timber companies, whose clear-cut logging practices are believed to destroy any salamanders unlucky enough to live in areas that are cut in this fashion.
The Nature Conservancy has been trying to purchase land in the Red Hills — a band of bluffs and valleys a few miles wide and 50 miles long, stretching across six Alabama counties — to protect the salamander for six years, with no success. Officials with the environmental group said they have a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, but must secure a matching amount from local sources before the federal money can be used.
Apodaca said he fears for the species' survival unless more robust protections are put in place by state or federal officials.
"They have very little protection, almost none," Apodaca said before releasing his catch back into its burrow. "Without some protected land and a large, viable protected population, they are not going to do well in the long run. Facing everything from habitat degradation to climate change and habitat loss, their longtime survival as a species is in question."
Unlike many threatened species, the only thing protecting the animals are voluntary "habitat conservation plans." A state Web site reports that such conservation plans are in place for less than half of the existing salamander habitat, with other landowners refusing to enroll in protection agreements.
http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1213694133110680.xml&coll=3
It is fishing in its most bizarre form, conducted deep in the woods with no water in sight.
Armed with hooks so small they might have been crafted by fairies and fishing line as fine as a baby's hair, J.J. Apodaca lets the live cricket on his hook do all the work.
Set outside the quarry's subterranean burrow at dusk, the poor cricket sees the tiny cave as a good hiding place and unwittingly marches in toward its doom.
The take is swift. Six inches of 2-pound test fishing line goes taut and the short fight is on.
It ends with Apodaca holding one of America's rarest creatures, a Red Hills salamander, this one with a number 16 barbless hook hanging from its jaw. The salamander is 10 inches long, its moist skin purple like a wet bruise and gleaming in the light of a setting sun. The entrance to the burrow it was plucked from was so small it could be plugged with a marble.
"If I'm dead sold that one of the holes is a burrow, then I'll let a cricket go down the hole," Apodaca said. "The salamander usually hits the cricket pretty hard."
Apodaca is a graduate student at the University of Alabama studying the genetics of the salamander under a state grant. He is one of the few scientists allowed to catch and handle them. Anyone else caught disturbing or killing the animals could be hit with a $100,000 fine.
Clinging stubbornly to a lonely existence in the deep hollows of Alabama's Red Hills, the official state amphibian lives nowhere else. It is hemmed in to its narrow range between the Conecuh and Alabama rivers by a series of evolutionary quirks that tie it so completely to these hills that it could not survive outside of them, even for a moment.
In fact, the animals can barely survive outside of their burrows, their tiny legs almost useless when it comes to walking around on the forest floor. The creature's skull is twice as thick as most salamanders and is used as a shovel to help dig the tunnels it spends its life in. Its tail is prehensile like a monkey's, allowing the animal to hold tight to underground roots inside its burrow, possibly helping protect it from raccoons that might try to pull them out and gobble them up.
The animal caught by Apodaca was 10 inches long and perhaps 8 or 9 years old, he said. He took pains to keep its body moist as the salamanders have no lungs and do all their breathing through their skin.
Federal officials have classed the salamander as "threatened" for decades, with just a fraction of 1 percent of its home range — about 150 acres — protected by state or federal agencies. A large, illegal and growing garbage dump sits on that protected land, about 100 yards from where Apodaca caught a large female Wednesday. The other 99 percent of suitable habitat is being whittled away bit by bit, day by day, threatening the creatures' very survival.
Most recently, the Alabama Department of Transportation ordered the removal of more than 100 salamanders from a hillside to make way for a truck passing lane on a hill along Alabama 21, though those animals may have represented but a fraction of the total living on that hillside. After the project fell through partly because of concerns about the salamander population, transportation officials said, the animals were returned to the hillside homes they were plucked from. When all was said and done, two of the animals had died, essentially for no reason at all.
Now, transportation officials are talking about starting the project, and perhaps the relocation effort, all over again. If possible, the road's route will be altered to avoid the salamanders, transportation officials said Friday.
The majority of the salamander's range is owned by timber companies, whose clear-cut logging practices are believed to destroy any salamanders unlucky enough to live in areas that are cut in this fashion.
The Nature Conservancy has been trying to purchase land in the Red Hills — a band of bluffs and valleys a few miles wide and 50 miles long, stretching across six Alabama counties — to protect the salamander for six years, with no success. Officials with the environmental group said they have a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, but must secure a matching amount from local sources before the federal money can be used.
Apodaca said he fears for the species' survival unless more robust protections are put in place by state or federal officials.
"They have very little protection, almost none," Apodaca said before releasing his catch back into its burrow. "Without some protected land and a large, viable protected population, they are not going to do well in the long run. Facing everything from habitat degradation to climate change and habitat loss, their longtime survival as a species is in question."
Unlike many threatened species, the only thing protecting the animals are voluntary "habitat conservation plans." A state Web site reports that such conservation plans are in place for less than half of the existing salamander habitat, with other landowners refusing to enroll in protection agreements.
http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1213694133110680.xml&coll=3