Recently, my son and I discovered a “new” population of Inyo Mountains salamanders, perhaps the twenty-first documented locality. It was in an unexpected situation—a seep just eighty yards long, which we reached after a long walk up an otherwise waterless drainage. A thin trickle of water slipped through a rank growth of grass and goldenrod, then disappeared into a dry wash. Although the little seep felt good, in an Inyo Mountains salamander sort of way, there did not seem to be enough habitat to support a viable population. As Martin and I began flipping rocks I figured that our hike had been a waste, at least in terms of salamanders, and the Spotted Towhees and Mountain Chickadees complaining from the nearby willow and wild rose seemed to accentuate what I assumed was the futility of our search. But when I lifted a rock a few yards beyond where the small seep trickled from the ground, at the very end of decent habitat, a salamander coiled—and a second salamander lay beneath a rock just a few inches away. Both were large (if an animal roughly three inches from its snout to the tip of its tail can be thought of as “large”), with a dark, chocolate-brown background color and delicate, silver-green speckles along their backs. Beneath the translucent belly skin of one salamander lay a yellowish mass of eggs, a promise for the future. I sat down and took the data that I needed, but after I was done, my world narrowed. The scolding of the birds, the random mental chatter that all too often accompanies my salamander searches, the quiet susurrus of wind in the pinyon pines, even the drift of falling water—they all fell away, and I was left with just those two seemingly fragile creatures, here, in such an unlikely place. The seep lay over a mile from the nearest water and known salamander population. If a restless salamander were to attempt such a journey, it would involve twenty-six hundred feet of elevation gain and loss, across arid, killing ground. It seemed very unlikely that any immigrants could have reached the seep since wetter times ended, some 12,000 years ago. After I released the salamanders and watched them crawl into their refuges, Martin and I packed our gear and headed back to the car. And as we walked I thought about the stories of the population we had just discovered: how and when the salamanders had first arrived in the canyon and how they managed to hang on, through all of the environmental changes that had been visited upon the Inyo Mountains. If the molecular geneticists have it right, the Inyo Mountain salamander lineage is five to ten million years old, meaning that the species would have survived the tectonic upheavals that gave rise to the Inyo Mountains, some three to four million years ago. Then came the waxing and waning pulses of precipitation during the Pleistocene Epoch—and 750,000 years ago, the violent explosion of the Long Valley Caldera, sixty miles to the northwest. Geologists estimate that the eruption was 2,500 times stronger than Mount St. Helens, and blasted out 144 cubic miles of ash and molten rock. Lethal pyroclastic flows of gas, ash, and pumice would have spilled across the land; perhaps this is why there are no salamanders in the White Mountains, just north of the Inyos. And more recently, roughly 7,500 to 4,500 years ago, the climate warmed and dried, and treeline moved far upslope of its current position.
Through all of these changes, the salamanders have persisted—as a species, and presumably in many of the drainages they now occupy, including the tiny bit of habitat where Martin and I had just been. The two individuals that we had found were members of the most recent among thousands of generations of their kind, living out their silent lives in that small place, a population riding the long waves of geological, climatic, and ecological variability into the present, going on and on. And although the details of their story are unknown (intrinsic rate of population increase, reproductive ecology, lifespan, population size, when the population was founded, how often the population has fallen toward a final extinction but then recovered) the theme was clear: endurance, sometimes in the face of great adversity. “Just imagine,” I thought, and then I wondered at it all—for there was something touching, and vitally important, about the lives of those salamanders, and their stories. And so what I considered, as I worked my way through the boulders and brush, were hope and some kind of proper perspective on my own life: here in the Inyo Mountains, but also in the larger world, in this time of grief and angst and anger.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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