Green Salamander - Aneides aeneus

Green Salamander
Aneides aeneus
Plethodontidae

Since I have been living on the South Cumberland Plateau, there have been two species of salamander that I have wanted to see most.  A couple of weeks ago I got to see both of them on the same evening!  I met up with my buddy Sanders Drukker, a student at Sewanee, University of the South, and future herpetologist extraordinaire.  Sanders had been reporting Green Salamanders from many locations on Sewanee's campus in the past few months, but somehow I had missed them on every foray I went on.  Logically, I knew I needed to go out with him on a Salamander meander to disrupt my string of bad luck.  Well, it worked.  We hiked at night down to Bridal Veil Falls Cave, flipping logs and rocks all along the way.  The moist undersurfaces of these substrates offer salamanders a safe refuge from predators and desiccation.  An important note and word of warning: always return the substrate to it's original position so as not to disrupt the microclimatic parameters, and always flip the material away from you.  Venomous snakes also take refuge under rocks and logs.

We were getting completely skunked.  About halfway to Bridal Veil, we decided to go slightly off trail to check a moist outcropping.  There it was, flat and contorted against the rocky slab, the Green Salamander.  After having seen so many pictures of it in my library, I was stoked to see it in such an uncomfortable looking position!  They can almost look like they have a broken back.  This trait, along with the species' exceptional flatness, is no coincidence.  They are crevice dwellers, contorting their bodies to fit into the tightest cracks.  However, they might not have always been so closely tied to their rocky habits.  It is believed that they used to inhabit trees!  Huge American Chestnut Trees!  Chestnuts were once one of the dominant trees of the Eastern forests.  A fungal blight was brought into the US on another species of chestnut, the Chinese chestnut, that virtually wiped out this dominant tree.  They are not completely wiped out though, thank goodness.  There are a very few of them in wide-scattered locations.  Also, and this super interesting, researchers at UT Chattanooga and the American Chestnut Foundation have developed a hybrid that is 15/16ths American and 1/16ths Chinese chestnut!!  The Chinese species is resistant to the blight, so the goal is to create hybrid strains that carry this resistance.  Hopefully, if everything works out, I will be planting some of these hybrids at the Hands On Science Center in Tullahoma.  Anyway, back to salamanders.  Instead of evolving to be flat in order to squeeze between rocks, the Green Salamander might be flat to squeeze between layers of bark.  In the same right, the contortionist habits might have evolved for tree climbing.  After watching so many rat snakes ascend straight up thick tree trunks, this makes sense to me - if you don't have claws or can't fly, become a contortionist.  The bright green makings on the back are thought to mimic lichens, those famously symbiotic associations between a fungus and an algae (or cyanobacteria).

(Sanders)

Perhaps one day, my children's children's children will climb to the top of a re-established American Chestnut (with some Chinese chestnut genes) to search the lichen-laden canopy branches for tiny, flattened, green-splattered contortionists, that for now squeeze into their rocky cracks, waiting.