And no, that wasn't the original title. It actually didn't have a title and that's all I could come up with in five seconds. This is an essay I wrote after taking a beautiful Saturday trip out to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center with my Science in Action class.
I have been here before. Technically, this is my first visit to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, but I have been here before. Born and raised in Derwood, about 30 miles northwest of the Laurel, Maryland, refuge, I spent many an early spring day trekking through woods identical to these, as our house backed up to one of the slithering tentacles of Rock Creek Regional Park that unfurls from the main tract of park land in Washington, DC. The sights are familiar: a green twig, so delicate in its infancy, growing skyward out of a graveyard of dead leaves, emerging triumphantly from the decaying bodies of its deceased cousins; the forest floor, patterned by the playful geometrical dance of branches and mid-morning light; the large oak trees that I can barely wrap my arms halfway around, hovering silently but fondly with an affected aloofness, like a parental chaperone trying to stealthily eavesdrop at a school dance.
As a child, the woods were a fun place to romp around with my sisters, a place where we would bounce on the suspended bridge a neighbor had constructed out of an old radio tower to span the ten-foot creek and compete to see who could sway the bridge the most, shrieking gleefully as our toes dipped closer to the shallow, russet water with each bounce. But as time has rolled on and the bridge’s glistening steel has faded to a muted rust, that forest has come to mean much more to me. It is where I discovered that stillness can be tranquil and not terrifying; that it implies not death, but a beautiful harmony of life. It is where as a teenager I would take solitary walks in order to feel less alone. It is where I came on September 12, 2001 to weep, to feel safe, to find something familiar and permanent in a world I no longer recognized.
Though my mother reassured me that the woods behind our house were park land and could never be razed to make room for the type of McMansion-ish housing developments that were beginning to crop up all over town, I worried. I worried most for the forest’s myriad furry and flowered inhabitants, but I also worried for myself. I didn’t want to look out from our back deck onto anything but the chorus of trees that had been rooted there all my life, singing their leafy hymns to the stars. As long as they don’t cut them down, it will be okay, I thought. I hadn’t even considered that the biggest threat to my beloved woods might actually lie within them, lurking among the perch and the poplar trees with a menacing silence.
Back at the Patuxent Center, I watch intently as Dr. Karen Lips and three of her graduate students demonstrate how to catch a salamander. As a highly regarded herpetologist and ecologist, Lips has traveled up and down Latin America studying amphibian species in some of the most biologically diverse regions of the world. In the case of the salamander, though, the most diverse and populous area is literally right in our own backyards: the Appalachian Mountain region is home to more salamanders than any other area on earth. But the salamander population, like that of many amphibian species, is declining drastically: approximately 47% of all salamander species are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as threatened or endangered, and many more may have already gone extinct.
Though Lips believes there are several man-made culprits responsible for these declines, the most immediate villain may actually be all-natural. Chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease, has been linked to deaths in many amphibian species all over the world, including salamanders. A zoosporic fungus that surreptitiously seeps into the skin of amphibians, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or “chytrid fungus,” as it is more commonly called, grows particularly well in cool, damp climates, giving it ample opportunity to encounter amphibian species that prefer the same. It has affected various species of salamanders differently, as some populations have experienced massive die-offs within months of the first infection – and sometimes even complete eradication – while in others only a small portion of the population has succumbed to the fungal disease. The cause of this differential vulnerability is just one of the mysteries of the chytrid fungus that Lips and her team are trying to solve, in addition to how environmental changes affect the spread of the fungus and what can be done to slow this spread. They hope that answering these questions about the fungus will help guide effective salamander conservation efforts.
Her students show me how to slowly turn over a rock in the middle of the shallow creek bed, as salamanders prefer cool, damp environments, and how to delicately scoop up the inches-long amphibian and place it into a plastic bag where it can be more easily examined. They point out the color and design on its back, one way of identifying the species, and how they can easily distinguish an adult from a larva that has yet to metamorphose by the gills that have shrunken in and the meatier body. I peer closely at the little guy, with his four tiny legs and the knowing black beads of his eyes, and immediately feel compelled to pet him. This is quite unlike me, as I have never been much of a mud-digger type; when my worm-loving sister would approach me to proudly show off her latest slimy capture, my typical reaction was to scream and run away. But the salamander is just so cute, and I get attached quickly. Within a matter of minutes I have a name for him (Chester) picked out in my head.
Lips and her team do a run-through of their data collection, where they record the location where the salamander was found, his length and weight, and check for the small fluorescent marker with which they had previously tagged many of the creatures. The markers serve as an aide for studying species’ survival and movement, but this particular one turns out to be unmarked. They then gently place the salamander back in the water where they found him, open the bag, and in an instant he is gone, likely back to the dank cool of another rock’s underside. We move out of the creek and into the surrounding forest, where we repeat the process but turn over large logs rather than river rocks, searching for another local species that is fully terrestrial and so would never be caught in the creek.
This work is not particularly cutting-edge or glamorous, but it is important. Though the decline of a relatively unseen class of animals may not strike fear into many hearts, Lips says the implications of dying salamanders are potentially catastrophic. They may be small, but salamanders are huge in number, and especially in this region make up a large portion of the biomass, or the sum of all the biological matter in the forest. They form an important link in the food chain between organisms too small for other animals to go after and larger animals who need to feed on meatier prey like salamanders to survive. Salamanders are also one of the most energetically efficient animals; unlike us warm-blooded humans, they do not waste much energy through heat loss, and a high percentage of the nutrients they take in are used to build up their body mass, which gives their predators more protein, and these benefits continue all the way up the food chain to us. They also act as important regulators of the insect population. Like a good nightclub bouncer, salamanders ensure the environment is not overpopulated with pests, and their absence could result in overcrowding that has consequences much more dire than a long line for the bathroom: it could mean an increased spread of insect-carried diseases like dengue fever and Chagas disease. We may not think about or notice these things, but we will almost certainly notice the huge ecological disruption that could result from massive salamander die-offs. As Lips wrote in an editorial for the Baltimore Sun, “Their fate is inexorably linked to our own.”
Just as all our futures may depend on the survival of one of the forest’s smallest and most inconspicuous inhabitants, so too does a part of my past. My relationship to nature as I experienced it growing up is a part of my identity; I try to imagine what it would feel like to visit my childhood home after the woods have gone, replaced by a hauntingly empty field or a gaggle of unwelcome new neighbors, but I can’t. Instead I imagine how I felt after returning home one spring from college in Boston to find that one of the half-dozen tulip poplar trees scattered around the interior of our backyard had been felled by a bad storm. This was a tree whose thick, low-slung limbs made it ideal for climbing, and as a child I had spent countless afternoons winding my way through its timber maze, reveling in the adventure and the danger as I ascended. For the first several days at home I did double-takes with every glance out the kitchen window, my mind startled by the new landscape that looked like a familiar smile rendered suddenly gap-toothed. Where anyone else might see a simple stump, I saw a hole, a disconcerting void in the skyline of my childhood, and I could feel an emptiness seeping down into the storage spaces of my heart. I strained to make sense of this feeling of loss, simultaneously obvious and obscure. It was just a tree, I told myself. But it had long ago insinuated itself into my memories, sprouting sinewy roots as strong as those that remained in the ground next to its fallen trunk. I try to do the math, to multiply this vague sadness times the number of trees in the whole park, but the total is too staggering for me to comprehend.
I know that I cannot stop the natural decay and wear of living. Trees will fall, and fungi will spread. Salamanders will die, but with the help of scientists like Lips, hopefully they will not die out. With proper management – guided by the kind of research Lips and her team are conducting – and a little luck, these forests will be around for generations of children to explore and find themselves in. Someday they too will be able to walk into a foreign patch of woods on a crisp spring morning and instantly feel at home. They too will be able to enjoy all the bountiful gifts that an intimacy with nature can bring, and whether they know it or not, they will have conservation scientists like Karen Lips to thank, at least in part, for the privilege.
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