Under cloak of darkness, they cross dangerous terrain. Up and down hills, around logs and rocks. Predators — Barred owls, skunks and unwitting size-9 Nikes — threaten their survival as they crawl over wet leaves and finally, hopefully, make their way to the breeding pool.

A female spotted salamander awaits processing.It was the March of the Salamanders, and although Morgan Freeman did not narrate their slithery trek, the journey of the spotted salamander from the underground burrows of Guion Woods to the man-made Guion Pond was no less dramatic.

For the first time at Sweet Briar College, on March 1 and 2, the breeding ritual was documented by a research team of students and professors. Although students have studied the local salamanders for decades, a few years ago someone threw a curve ball at the little critters, necessitating a more in-depth study.

In 2002, predatory mosquitofish were released into the pond, possibly by a well-intentioned fisherman or someone afraid of the spread of West Nile Virus. “We are concerned that these fish and other predators may be eating so many juveniles that the population will decline,” biology professor Linda Fink said recently.

“The study we’re starting, and hope to continue for years, will give us a lot of information about the population. The specific question we hope to address is whether our population has a healthy mix of individuals of all ages, or if it is an aging population because few or no juveniles are escaping from the predators in the pond.”

Black with neon yellow spots, the salamanders are about 8 inches long, including the tail. They are native to Sweet Briar as well as the eastern United States and southern Canada. The Guion Woods salamanders are the only group that Fink is aware of on campus.

Professor Jane Belcher and students examine an egg mass in 1968. Mike Hayslett, adjunct professor of environmental science at Sweet Briar, has been studying wetlands and their inhabitants for 20 years. He believes this “family” of salamanders has been breeding in Guion Pond for a half century or more.

Unlike most amphibians that live two or three years, he said, spotted salamanders can live to be 20 or 30. They spend about 360 days a year underground, eating earthworms and bugs, and emerge on the first warm, rainy day of the year — the “salamander rain” — to breed.

Hayslett defined salamander rain as a “cyclical event,” and said three conditions — rain, near-50-degree temperatures and thunder — are usually present. “Some say it’s an auditory cue,” he said of the thunder. “The rumbles and vibration might be a cue to wake them up.”

Above ground, the salamanders’ objective is equally primal. Biology professor Fink put it simply: “Once a year, they doodle over to the pond, have sex for a week and come back.”

Ready, Set, Whoa

Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with Mother Nature, you’re also on her time clock.

The team, made up mostly of ecology students, had hoped to begin their research on Feb. 20. The timing was right — in this area, salamander movement usually begins in mid-February to early March — and a chance of rain was in the weather forecast.

“[They have] porous skin and are very susceptible to drying out. They need a high moisture content in the air,” Hayslett said, adding that some might travel as far as a half a mile to the pond, making dehydration a viable threat.

Add to that the fact that spotted salamanders aren’t exactly speedy. “They’re very slow,” he said. “Not like skinks.”

Environmental studies major Sarah Doyle '09 awaits instructions from Fink.It was after 6 p.m. in the Guion biology lab when Fink gave the students — many clad in rain gear and rubber boots — their assignments. Some would be on “pit crews,” gathering salamanders from around sheet metal fences the team had erected in various woodland locations.

According to Hayslett, salamanders aren’t keen on climbing over large objects, so when they reach a solid fence or log, they will turn left or right. In this case, after making the turn salamanders would fall into buried coffee cans full of leaf matter.

Pit crew staffers would then scoop up the salamanders, deposit them in plastic baggies, and label the bags with time and location.

Other students would be “runners,” transporting the creatures back and forth between the pit crews and the lab. Some would be “spotters,” scanning the woodland trail for action and marking salamander sightings with surveyor’s flags.

In the lab, students and professors would process the salamanders — measuring, weighing, photographing, and using the “Twitty” method to remove one of the animals’ toes for future identification and chronology purposes.

“You can tell the age of the salamander, like tree rings,” Hayslett said. “We have the specific goal to obtain [and] preserve how stable this population of spotted salamanders might be. If it’s composed mostly of old adults with little apparent recruitment, as evidenced by younger adults, then we have a population of critters that needs help.”

After processing, the runners would take the salamanders back to where they were found and point them toward the pond. “Kiss them on the head and wish them fond farewell,” Fink said, eliciting a groan from Hayslett.

“No,” he said. “Don’t kiss them on the head.”

Assignments made, the students waited in the lab, headlamps perched on their heads. But still, there was no rain. So Fink and Hayslett suspended the study and led the group on a brief tour of Guion Woods, pointing out the fences and demonstrating collection methods.

As for the postponement, Hayslett just shrugged. “If we hit it, it’s one of the coolest phenomena,” he said.

Raining Salamanders

The salamander rain began on March 1, first as a misty morning drizzle and progressing to a soaking rain by midnight. By 10 p.m. the woods around Guion Pond were slicker than a spotted salamander.

The team met in the lab at 6:30 p.m., and within an hour the first salamanders were spotted. By 7:30, sophomore Jenny Walkiewicz said the sunken coffee cans at one fence line had halted the forward progression of about 50 specimens.

“They were exciting,” she said, adding what had become a common opinion. “They are very cute.”

At about 9:30 p.m. Doreen McVeigh was on the trail working as a spotter. The sophomore estimates she found one every three minutes. “They were scurrying along the path pretty quickly,” she said, countering Hayslett’s claim that salamanders are slow. “They’re pretty quick when they want to be.”

Students worked past midnight, counting and processing salamanders.By 10 p.m. the team had counted more than 200. In the lab, baggies of yellow polka-dotted amphibians monopolized the end of one table as students and professors measured, weighed and documented salamanders. Mud was everywhere — on boots, clothes, and trailing down the tiled hallway.

Hayslett, dressed in a pink and green Sweet Briar T-shirt and matching green hat, said the results were exceptional. “Tonight’s success, I attribute to the pink T-shirt,” he said, jokingly. “I put on the T-shirt and got the call.”

By morning, approximately 575 salamanders had been encountered, 470 of which were hand examined in the lab. The male to female ratio was 3-to-1, and the largest recorded was a 42.5-gram female. “We saw some extremely large individuals, suggesting a very stable and old population,” Hayslett said.

“But we also were delighted to see many smaller, younger adults, suggesting that sufficient recruitment is occurring. This is, of course, prior to number crunching and summer investigations into this matter.”

A student measures the width of one specimen.There were other surprises during the night, too, including spotless salamanders and animals with bifurcated and trifurcated toes. Salamander No. 201 had a thin, deformed tail. Hayslett attributed the abnormality to malnutrition, prompting one thoughtful student to ask, “Can I give him a cricket?”

The team also was taken aback to see many salamanders emerge from burrows adjacent to the pond, and not from deeper in the forest as predicted. Standing in ankle-deep mud around midnight, Hayslett pointed to an area near the pond’s spillway where the creek bed sunk underground.

He said he’d seen salamanders pouring from the hole like water from a well — “dozens and dozens” of them. “It’s humbling to be outsmarted by eight-inch amphibians,” he said later.

Equally surprising, some salamanders didn’t go to Guion Pond at all, and opted to breed in a cove on the eastern side of the Upper Lake. “I had a hunch that some might go to the Upper Lake,” Hayslett said, adding that he’d set a few basket traps just in case.

“Possibly another two dozen salamanders are residing in that northern extreme of Guion Woods and instead of hiking to the pond, which is saturated with animals, they go down the slope to the lake.”

After laying their eggs, the adult salamanders will return home with the next rain, and it’ll be mid-summer before babies emerge from the pond and make their way into Guion Woods. In the meantime, Hayslett, Fink and their team have lots of work to do, analyzing data, planning future studies and coming up with a conservation plan.

“It was exhausting,” Hayslett said a couple of days later. “But it was a sensational experience and greatly exceeded my expectations. [It was] the best ‘big night’ experience I’ve seen since 1998, and I was delighted that the students got to experience this natural phenomenon, especially after we built up their anticipation so. Whew, [I’m] relieved.”

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer