Amelia Greiner Safi<\/a>, M.S. \u201906, professor of social and behavioral science and public health practice in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health in the College of Veterinary Medicine, said she has loved frogs and salamanders since she was little.<\/p>\n\u201cI feel like I\u2019m getting access to this secret world coming out at night,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s all this stuff happening that we miss, but it\u2019s just a total source of delight.\u201d<\/p>\n
The migration typically takes a couple of weeks in total, but most years the majority will migrate over one or two nights, meaning a lot of amphibians in the road at once.<\/p>\n
\u201cSalamanders did not evolve with roads in mind and as a result are not aware of how dangerous they are,\u201d Hedrick said. \u201cFor instance, they\u2019ll stop on the road if it stops raining because they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, this isn\u2019t a good time to move. It\u2019s not raining. I\u2019ll just wait here in the middle of the road till it starts again.\u2019 So you get these mass mortality events, even at relatively low traffic volumes.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spring peeper gets a lift across Sapsucker Woods Road. TCAMP volunteers look for several species of frogs and salamanders during patrols, including the spotted salamander, Jefferson\/blue-spotted salamander, wood frogs and green frogs, and the less common four-toed salamander.<\/p>\n
Amphibians are important ecological indicator species because they are extremely sensitive to environmental change, Hedrick said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese guys largely breathe through their skin and have very permeable skin,\u201d he said. \u201cThey require very moist environments to live, and they\u2019re often the first group to be adversely affected in a given community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Connecting the public with science<\/p>\n
Bredin founded TCAMP in 2023, bringing together existing patrol efforts underway within CVM and through a group at Ithaca College that Professor Leann Kanda has led for 15 years. In the TCAMP\u2019s first patrol in 2024, 100 volunteers documented 900 amphibians. This year, more than 300 volunteers have patrolled in five counties, and by March 7, they had documented more than 2,000 individual amphibians.<\/p>\n
Many volunteers are members of the Cornell community, but the organization is not formally affiliated with Cornell and welcomes anyone. Bredin and Tran participate in outreach events for TCAMP throughout the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely rewarding to show kids, but also adults, what we\u2019re doing and get them excited about natural history. Many participants had never collected scientific data or knew how to identify local amphibians prior to this,\u201d said Tran, who is a doctoral student in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology. \u201cI love connecting the public with science and with what we do as researchers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The data volunteers collect can inform conservation efforts and further research. It identified migration hotspots that Bredin is studying as part of his master\u2019s project on juvenile salamander road mortality in the summer and fall.<\/p>\n
A Newt Hope team members Sam Rimm-Kaufman, MLA \u201925, and Kathy Stenehjem, a doctoral student in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology, record temperature, weather and road conditions on a waterproof data sheet before starting patrol on March 6.<\/p>\n
Patrollers tally the number of vehicles that drive past, weather and road conditions, the number and species of amphibians, and the direction they are traveling.<\/p>\n
All that data can show where to place patrols, whether selective road closings could help and where to build underpasses that allow amphibians to travel beneath a road, for example.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back on Sapsucker Woods Road, multiple drivers stopped their vehicles to ask the patrollers what they were up to. Some were already familiar with the patrol.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A TCAT bus driver stopped and leaned out his window to admire the spotted salamander in Bredin\u2019s hands. He thanked Bredin and wished the group luck before continuing on his way.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a huge amount of enthusiasm here for this kind of work,\u201d Bredin said. \u201cI think it would be a shame for that interest and that passion to not be used for good. I think that by doing this, we can make Tompkins County a little bit of a better place for these animals and for the people interacting with them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conditions rarely beloved by humans \u2013 42 degrees, raining, dark \u2013 are perfect for salamanders. Graduate student Stephen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-528233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}