The Magnificent Seven of the Redwoods: Two Giants, two Slenders, a Tree climber, Golden Eye, and a Poisonous Newt
Wells Shoemaker
Golden fingers of dawn caressed the primeval mists draped over the Jurassic swamp. On this special morning, an audacious salamander dared to crawl out of the shallow water into the marvels and hazards of terrestrial life. It has taken a few years, roughly 170 million of them, but these wiggly pioneers have managed to populate most of the moist environments on Earth, happily including the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park.
Salamanders spent those intervening years manifesting a remarkable diversity in size, decorations, habitats, and quirks. Some are smaller than a pinkie finger, while others grow to the size of a kindergartner’s forearm. They’re committed predators but they’re not bashful about strutting gaudy colors, stripes, and spots. Most of the time, they would rather hide than fight.
Some salamanders have lungs, but others absorb oxygen directly through their thin, moist skins. The diffusion of oxygen is a slow process, which means that lungless salamanders are not exactly aerobic athletes. On the other hand, one of our lungless locals climbs oak trees.
The salamanders’ moist skin requires means they need to stay constantly damp, or else they would simply dry up to a crisp. Some of our local salamanders breed in the creeks but spend most of their lives on land. Others live and breed on land and somehow manage to stay moist in duff, burrows, and the shelter of logs and rocks.
The permeable skin allows oxygen to pass directly into the animals without the added complexity of lungs and compartmentalized circulation. That’s convenient, but that trait also renders them vulnerable to a challenge their ancestors never experienced until the last hundred years or so: fast absorption of manmade toxins and acid rain. Scientists have mounting concerns for the survival of many salamanders, frogs, and toads. Global warming isn’t helping creatures who need to stay cool and moist.
Because they move slowly and don’t brandish fierce claws and scary teeth, salamanders have needed to deploy clever defensive strategies when camouflage fails. One genius skill is the ability to regenerate lost body parts. A wading shorebird might get away with an inch or two of wiggly tail in its beak, but in the commotion, the wounded salamander crawls away to live another day and make a new tail.
Most salamanders can even regenerate parts of their three-chambered hearts if damaged. Doctors are jealous!
Like some of their amphibian classmates, the frogs and toads, some salamanders exude potent poisons as a novel defense strategy. That’s creative ecology! Read the Rough Skinned Newt section below!
Salamanders resemble lizards in body configuration, but of course, lizards are reptiles with teeth, scales, and fingernails. Lizards have dry, armored skin, and they generally do fine in hot and dry climates. Salamanders are not designed for the desert.
Salamanders have short legs and little toes, while lizards often sport long, springy legs and a penchant for speed.
Lizards and salamanders both have real backbones and long bones with calcium, but in both cases, those support structures are thin and flexible. Salamander skeletons are soft and malleable...one could say they’re rubbery. The lizards have tougher skeletons, necessary for all that scampering, jumping, and wildland parkour. Salamanders, even those with lungs, enjoy a more laid back pace...properly aligned for our special county.
On the other hand, slow isn’t so bad. Some salamanders, including our golden-eyed Ensatina, can live for a long time in the wild...30 years with luck.
We have, I believe, 7 species of salamanders living in our Park...and that doesn’t count the most famous Salamander in Aptos, the Santa Cruz Long Toed salamander, which prefers the more open terrain closer to Seascape. More on those fellows and their philosophical messages at the end.
Let’s get to know them!
Arboreal salamanders, (Aneides lugubris), pictured above, can be found 5 stories up an oak tree, living in creases, hollows, and rotten sections of the tree. They have shiny, brownish blue skin with spots, and they grow up to 6 or 7 inches in length. They have a large head and a meaty contour.
Like quite a few on our list, arboreal salamanders do not have lungs. They absorb oxygen through their skin, which means that they can act quickly for a few seconds, but then slow down.
By report, they can use their muscular tails to help grasp precarious attachments to the tree they call home. Humans consider themselves developmentally superior because we have prehensile thumbs. That’s handy, but these salamanders have prehensile tails.
The arboreals lay eggs in their tree retreats or in the ground, and the female guards them for 3 or 4 months before the babies hatch. Juveniles, especially noticeable by their wiggly vigor, look a great deal like their parents.
Arboreals are dedicated predators. They have strong jaws and a row of sharp teeth that would fit nicely in a Spielberg movie! When they snag their prey, usually a bug, it’s game over. Judging from the size of arboreals, that’s quite a few bugs.
Ensatina salamanders are famous for a wide range in California, forming a ring around the Central Valley and extending from the coast to the Sierra foothills. Since salamanders don’t ever travel far in a lifetime, the extended time of separation from cousins may account for quite a few variations in appearance. Our local Ensatinas are known colloquially as Monterey Salamanders but really should be “Aptos Salamanders.” They have reddish brown backs, an orange tummy, and...golden eyes. Hence the long scientific name: Ensatina escholtzii xanthoptica (Latin for...Golden Eye! Sorry, James Bond...the herpetologists* got there first.)
*Herpetologists are the scientists who study reptiles and amphibians. They occasionally refer to their colleagues as Herpers. I believe all herpers have 4 chambered hearts.
These creatures spend their entire lives on land, and they can live for 30 years. Lungless like the arboreal, Ensatinas conserve energy when they can, but can move quickly for short distances to capture insects or escape predators. They can be found under logs on the forest floor or woodpiles in the wet months of the year. In the summer, when our coastal environment dries out, these moisture craving salamanders retreat into abandoned rodent burrows or tunnels left by rotted tree roots to estivate. Back to the Latin, that word means hang out for the summer, in contrast to warm blooded mammals which settle down for the winter to hibernate.
The adult Ensatinas reach a size about the length of a human adult’s middle finger, without the attitude. When disturbed, however, they arch their backs and elevate their tails in a menacing posture. Under stress, the Ensatina exudes a milky substance on the tail...which apparently doesn’t taste good to a predator.
Ensatinas lay just 2 or 3 pea sized eggs in their terrestrial hideaways during the wet season, and the babies could win the Oscar for cuteness. (Pediatricians are experts in this realm.)
Slender salamanders, unlike the meaty arboreals and the two-tone Ensatinas, look like worms with the world’s teeniest feet and four even teenier toes fore and aft.
Slender salamanders don’t have lungs, and their movements tend to be slow and deliberate, although they wiggle underneath leaves and oak duff quickly when exposed. They spend their lives in the dark realm of their shelters, lay eggs on land, and, on a good day, delight human children learning to respect natural wonders.
There are more than a dozen slender species along the West Coast, and we have two locally. The more dapper one, The California Slender Salamander (Batrochoseps attenuatus), is charcoal colored with a flashy, copper colored streak down the back. The other, which seeks the same territory, is nearly black. This creature may be the black bellied slender salamander, or Batrochoseps nigriventris, like the one in the photo above. I’ll need an astute herper to help me verify this!
Rough Skinned Newts (Taricha granulosa) may be the easiest salamander to spot in the Forest of Nisene Marks, as they make little effort to hide in the rainy season. The Forest of Nisene Marks lies in the most southerly extension of their range...which goes all the way up the coast to Alaska.
These salamanders have lungs, which allows them to move quickly across the redwood forest floor. That mobility comes in handy when it’s time to clamber down from the hillside, cross the fire road, and head for the creek...where they breed. They don’t move fast enough to dodge a mountain bike, however, and in the early spring, it’s not unusual for a hiker to find a half dozen newts brutally crushed in the track. Fortunately, most of them make it. Once on a rainy, early spring hike, I saw hundreds of these newts enjoying a spectacular party time in the Maple Falls plunge pool.
Rough skinned newts mate in the water and lay their eggs there. Nisene Marks has a lot of these places: eddies in the perennial creeks, shallow ephemeral ponds off the beaten tracks, and larger lagoons in the wet seasons. The larvae hatch and feed on protozoa until they grow, gradually acquiring a taste for visible food. They leave the water and venture up to a terrestrial existence, seeking moist shelter for safety and forage...until it’s time to go back down to the river for the prom.
These amphibians are notorious for one thing beyond crowd sourced mating rituals. They produce a powerful neurotoxin—tetrodotoxin—which is found in their internal organs. That, plus a bad odor, will either deter a predator...or kill it should the predator impetuously swallow the poisonous prey. (That fate apocryphally fell hard upon some unwise human revelers who ran out of goldfish to swallow in a North Coast lumberjack bar...so they went outside in the dark to catch and swallow orange newts.)
The name of that toxin should sound familiar...it’s the same, exotic molecule found in the liver of the puffer fish. Even in tiny doses, it’s one of the most lethal poisons known to science...mere microgram amounts. It kills human consumers who don’t know how to clean the fish. In Japan, only a small number of certified chefs are permitted to prepare and serve it. How tetrodotoxin turned up in a tropical reef fish and a creature roaming the conifer forests of the Northwest remains a mystery. Handling a newt doesn’t generally open the toxic floodgates, but it’s best to leave the newts alone, no matter how hungry you are.
Newt versus Salamander: What’s the difference?
All newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts.
Newts, like our rough skinned one, have both aquatic and terrestrial life phases. They breed in the water and lay eggs. The babies spend their early lives in the water. At some point, they metamorphosize by losing their swimming tails and migrate onto land. In contrast to the smooth skin typical of most terrestrial salamanders, newts often have bumpy or rough feeling skin.
Other newts may return to an aquatic environment after their terrestrial phase. Old Jurassic habits, apparently, die hard!
Truth in labeling: Giant Salamanders are big! These muscular predators reach a foot in length. Their life cycles are more complicated than the others we described. They lay their eggs in streams and shelter them under rocks and logs. The female guards them until they hatch 2 months later.
The hatchlings, known as larvae, have gills...and a legendary appetite. They’ll eat just about any creature smaller than they are: insects, crustaceans, and small fish. After about two years, the larvae lose their gills and transition to a terrestrial phase, but they rarely venture much more than 50 yards from the water.
According to herpetologists who write on the subject, some of these giant adults keep their gills and never leave the water. If anybody has seen a gilled giant in our Park, they have kept it quiet. The Forest of Nisene Marks keeps plenty of secrets.
Among other marvels, the giants vocalize...described by some as a bark or a croak...when threatened.
In almost 60 years of hiking in Nisene Marks, I have only twice seen the dark skinned Coastal fellows with their camo-style dorsal decorations creeping across the fire road. In the swale below the Westridge Trailhead, there’s a culvert under the road where a feeder creek flows down to Aptos Creek. For some reason, instead of taking the “tunnel,” these intrepid salamanders chose instead to cross the graded road in full view. I doubt they were aware of the dangers from wheels large and small. One of these travelers was being taunted with a stick by a little boy while his mother giggled. I intervened politely and helped the big amphibian get out of traffic.
Avid Nisene Marks hikers, bikers, and athletes Geoff and Meredith Drake (Geoff was an Advocates Board member in the previous century) came across a reddish California Giant on the fire road in early June, 2024, at another location. That lucky giant also was gently escorted...croaking vigorously...out of harm’s way.
The Future for Salamanders
The salamanders of our beautiful Park are teaching us something if we pay attention. The giants are rarely seen, even by our busiest hikers and rangers. Beyond fast moving vehicles, the big salamanders are vulnerable to any number of human-initiated harms, and they’re likely approaching endangered status. Even the more prevalent species are threatened by loss of habitat and the chemical toxins we spew into the air and our waters. As global warming heats up the forests, salamanders will find their shrinking habitat to be less forgiving.
The Santa Cruz Long Toed Salamander (Ambystoma macrodactylum croceum) survives in Aptos but does not inhabit Nisene Marks as far as we know, but their story is important. This gentle creature’s recent ordeal offers two messages for us to heed.
History: This rare and federally protected endangered species was nearly wiped off the planet when Highway 1 was widened in Aptos in the late 1960s, obliterating much of the Valencia Lagoon...at that time, the only location in the world they could be found. (It’s the green area on the coastal side of the freeway between Rio del Mar and Freedom Boulevard exits.) As the land above was concurrently developed without adequate winter precautions, siltation nearly did in the few survivors. Those events weren’t perpetrated maliciously, but the deeds went down. Proposals were even on the table to fill in the “swamp” for condos and commercial development. It took a good deal of local energy to uphold the rights of the native creatures to survive.
It turns out that some small populations of the furtive creatures also live in ephemeral pools in the oak uplands above Seascape. The County responded by generating protective ordinances which did not please developers at the time. Our County leaders held their ground, not without ferocious pushback from some quarters. Most important: the salamanders survived.
Message #1: Decent human beings can wreak permanent havoc without even knowing it. The salamanders were nearly deleted in a matter of a few years after the species had lived unobtrusively here for countless millennia, long before any humans moved here. Aggressive grading, drainage of natural moisture sources, pollution, new roads, proliferation of housing, and incursion of non-native plantings conspired to unleash a near amphibian apocalypse.
Message #2: The conservation mitigations worked. Humans can do something to mitigate these threats, but it takes good science, sensible leadership, and warm blooded courage to prevail over short term gain. This is a righteous pursuit, but never easy.
While Nisene Marks seems like a sanctuary, amphibians all over the world are dropping like flies. The thin skins of amphibians make them more vulnerable to small amounts of toxins. The loss of water from the soils, streams, and rivers is accelerating as global warming progresses. The salamanders, frogs, and toads are giving us humans a warning: You guys are next.
Stated differently, I once said: Once all the frogs die, then people will start to croak.
We can do things which help, including exercising a public voice, and the Forest of Nisene Marks can teach us how important that will be.
Wells Shoemaker MD is a retired pediatrician, board member of the Advocates, winemaker for Salamandre Wine Cellars in Aptos, and a runner/biker/explorer of the woods and riparian corridors of the Park since the 1960s.
Photos by the author and as attributed to Sara Shoemaker Lind, William Flaxington, John P. Clare, and David Pereksta
Copyright © 2024
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