Good time to be an Amphibian

As all of you know it has literally rained everyday for the past two weeks. All of this rain has saturated the ground with water so in many cases there is standing water through fields yards and wooded areas where once was dry. This can be obnoxious and annoying to us but for amphibians it is perfect. If you live in the country you certainly can tell this from the incredibly loud choir heard every evening of wood frogs, peepers and many others. This is also their time to mate and travel from wooded areas to ponds streams and lakes to reproduce. 

Wood frogs,Rana sylvatica,  a semi common frog found through out the united states is one of these in the choir. These frogs have some truly fascinating adaptations allowing them to survive over the winter months close to the surface in leaf litter or peat moss. They can tolerate the freezing of their blood and other tissues which is truly amazing as in order to do this you have be able to when you freeze not have your cells burst. They do this by producing large quantities of urea in there tissues and then turn the glycologen in their livers to glucose, these two adaptations allow for limited ice growth through these areas. The rest of a wood frogs body can freeze up to 65% of the water content in a wood frog can turn to ice. There is also sexual dimorphism in wood frogs as shown below the female is about 1.5 times larger than the male and is also a different color. This is common in animals and is found commonly in all the different animal kingdoms especially in insects.   

  

Spotted salamanders

During the first warm wet days of spring amphibians called spotted salamanders begin to mate. Spotted salamanders are very cool amphibians as they are quite large unlike some of the other salamanders that you commonly see these range between 4-9 inches. There a purplish color with bright yellow spots on there back hence the name. These salamanders have another very unique adaptation they have developed a symbiotic relationship with algae actually living inside the embryos of the eggs. This is a recent discovery and this makes the spotted salamander the only known vertebrate to have an endosymbiont (a co-evolution with algae where the algae makes food for the animal).
Spotted salamanders are found through out the Northern and Midwestern states reaching up into Canada. They usually live in burrows and under logs and foliage so it is quite hard to spot them while walking around. But they are quite abundant.

Spotted salamander - Ambystoma maculatum

A picture of the Salamander in the pond with a newt in the background.

Journal list

7 things I did for my project last week.
1) Staked out my transect with plots
2) Walked my transect with a G.P.S. and recorded the elevation of the stops.
3) recorded data from my walks on to Excel
4) Practied identifcation of different tree species along with amphiban species.
5) Took pictures of different trees and idenfied them on my comptuer
6) started to practice different identifiying different bird calls.
7) Thoguht about ways to start identifying plants at different trasect stops.

reflection of the week

This week went by very fast, I have worked a lot on my project. I have been doing many walks and recording the data and after doing these walks along my transect I found it very hard to follow on and now have decided to take Stakes and hammer them into the ground to keep my barrings straight. I will also use these stakes as survey points. I am about to go and setup the stakes but first I have to drill holes in them in order to put string through them. After I am done with this it will help me a whole lot to say on the path. 

I also this week saw an American Kestrel on my land I haven't seen one of these for a long time and I thought it was pretty cool. These birds are declining in this region do to the farming fields going back to woods. This is where they hunt so it was neat to see one of these birds on my land. A Kestrel is a type of falcon and is quite small they eat mice voles and other small creatures. I have a picture of it below. 

American Kestrel