- Joined
- Feb 6, 2001
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- 8,174
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- Age
- 48
- Location
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- Ireland
- Display Name
- John Clare
While all the Americans were eating their turkey on November 27th, I was out in the woods of East Texas. The area of woods I was in is the same place my friend Scott took me in April (see this post) and where we found an Ambystoma texanum and Scott saw an A. opacum before it disappeared into a burrow. This time I was on my own and I was hoping to find some A. texanum and A. opacum, and I thought I had a shot at A. talpoideum because they are known from the general area - indeed in April we found some of their larvae in a pond less than a mile away from here.
This is the habitat. You can see there is quite a bit of damage due to the hurricanes that came through East Texas over the past few months:
I was flipping about 5 minutes when I found this piece of wood (with accessory fungus) near a tiny channel on a slope down to where I took the habitat photo (you can see part of that slope on the left of the habitat photo):
... under which were this Marbled Salamander (Ambystoma opacum) female and her eggs:
Within 10 feet of the nest, I rolled this Texas Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi texana):
I was soon to realise that (1) there were a bunch of Ambystoma opacum in the area, and (2) no other species of salamander was coming out to play.
Here's a very large male I flipped:
And a smaller male:
When I flipped another it obviously decided it didn't like me - note the defensive fluid on the upper end of the tail region:
After this I stopped photographing Marbleds. I was quite disappointed not to turn up a Small-mouth but I will be back.
The following day I hit up the talpoideum pond but other than some Leopard frog tadpoles I found no amphibians. I did flip my first scorpion though, and I flipped another Marbled Salamander.
I used to live in the area where I was herping but I was ignorant of the abundant salamander population close to where I lived. I hadn't considered that such a warm part of the country could support so many individual salamanders and species. I'm glad I was informed before I moved out of driving distance.
This is the habitat. You can see there is quite a bit of damage due to the hurricanes that came through East Texas over the past few months:
I was flipping about 5 minutes when I found this piece of wood (with accessory fungus) near a tiny channel on a slope down to where I took the habitat photo (you can see part of that slope on the left of the habitat photo):
... under which were this Marbled Salamander (Ambystoma opacum) female and her eggs:
Within 10 feet of the nest, I rolled this Texas Brown Snake (Storeria dekayi texana):
I was soon to realise that (1) there were a bunch of Ambystoma opacum in the area, and (2) no other species of salamander was coming out to play.
Here's a very large male I flipped:
And a smaller male:
When I flipped another it obviously decided it didn't like me - note the defensive fluid on the upper end of the tail region:
After this I stopped photographing Marbleds. I was quite disappointed not to turn up a Small-mouth but I will be back.
The following day I hit up the talpoideum pond but other than some Leopard frog tadpoles I found no amphibians. I did flip my first scorpion though, and I flipped another Marbled Salamander.
I used to live in the area where I was herping but I was ignorant of the abundant salamander population close to where I lived. I hadn't considered that such a warm part of the country could support so many individual salamanders and species. I'm glad I was informed before I moved out of driving distance.
