Building Communities that Conserve Wetlands

We tried to sample earlier, but had to battle rain, so we went July 1, and battled heat. It hadn’t rained in a while, but our pond was full from the earlier heavy rains.

While we didn’t find any salamanders (I suspect they were deeper), we were excited to find lots of tadpoles. The challenge became telling the little critters apart! After comparing many pictures, and tiny characteristics, we worked out a system of the most common species in our pond. The first barking tree frog was unrecognizable, because it was the size of a candy Nerd. All we could see was the coil intestine, lateral eyes, and black markings on the head. After that, we found tons of barking tree frogs! We also found an abundance of Southern chorus frogs which have copper bellies, and Southern cricket frogs which have a definitive black tipped tail. We named a couple other larvae, but it’s hard to say if they were different species, or if we were too novice to tell the difference.

Next time we’ll bring a camera, to document those characteristics. We’re learning the frog calls, so we can use those in our survey.

Beware of unwanted stragglers - we found a leech and a tick under our clothes after sampling.

The next few weeks will be ideal for dipnetting the Munson Sandhill wetlands.  The winter-breeding amphibian larvae will be nice and large, easier to identify!   We have found gopher frog tadpoles in quite a few wetlands and I thought it would be good to provide a few details for identifying Lithobates tadpoles.

Remember Lithobates is the genus for the true frogs.  The tadpoles have eyes toward the top of their head, not on the sides like the other tadpoles.   The species you may encounter include bullfrog, gopher frog, pig frog, and southern leopard frog.

If your tadpole is green it could either be a bullfrog or a gopher frog.  Gopher frog tadpoles are not always green, but usually they are a yellowish greenish color.  They have spotted tails so that’s a good ID clue.

Bullfrogs usually have what looks like stitching along their body.  They, too, have spots but they are like tiny dots.  So if you have a greenish tadpole with spots = gopher frog.  Greenish tadpole with stitching and tiny dots = bullfrog.

Pig frogs will have spotted tails but the spots will be in a line along the tail fin.

Southern leopard frog tadpoles are usually dark in color and spotted, but they greatly vary.  Look for the white mustache and/or the vertical white line down the snout.  Sorry we don’t have a great picture of this…

This week we released 131 captive-bred newts of various life stages into two wetlands in the Munson Sandhills.

For those of you who adopted Wetlands 12, 15, 20, 26, 48, and 73 keep your eyes out.  Its possible once the striped newts leave their repatriation wetlands, they could migrate to your wetlands.

So far none of the newts have left the wetlands.  This is actually a good thing as we would like them to imprint on their wetland for a while so they are more likely to return to the same one next year.  We’ll keep you posted!