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The Elusive Mudpuppies

This past week has been busy for both our internships and capstone. My internship is focused on conducting surveys for the common mudpuppy. The common mudpuppy, along with the notorious hellbender, are two giant salamanders that are completely aquatic! Mudpuppies are distinctive from the hellbenders based on one amazing feature: red gills! These gills come off the side of their head and are bright red compared to the brown body.


Photo of an adult mudpuppy. From Indiana Herp Atlas.


My survey partner and I have been currently looking for juveniles in rivers around Macon County. This past week we went to the Cartoogechaye Creek just upstream of where it joins the Little Tennessee River. When we visit these areas, we are looking for leaf litter packs, woody debris piles, and root wads, which is where the juveniles like to hide out before maturing. Before we search for the mudpuppies we take measurements of the area and take qualitative notes on the surrounding area. We then use nets to sample the area and pick through what we caught looking for the salamanders.


Alex looking through a leaf pack sample.


Unfortunately, we have not found any mudpuppies, but we are not giving up hope! We have plans to keep sampling Cartoogechaye Creek, along with the Cullasaja River and other rivers. We will continue using this method to look for juveniles until the end of September. In October we will begin looking for adults, which we will do by setting traps in the middle of the river, these will be checked after 24 hours. We hope that we will find many mudpuppies at different life stages this semester, which will help our mentors assess their populations and if they need to be listed as an endangered species.


This week also included the first day of our going into the field for our capstone. This semester we will be looking at how storm events affect the microplastic levels in the Chattooga River. To do this we deployed two ISCO samplers along the river, one close to the wastewater treatment center and the other several miles downstream. To collect data for storms the ISCOs have to be turned on before a storm hits because they do not stay on at all times. We also learned how to program the ISCO to take samples over different periods of time. This will come in handy since every storm is different and we want to collect samples that accurately represent the storm. We also took width and depth measurements of the river so we can later graph the slope of the sample areas. At the end of this, we put out atmospheric buckets at each location. These buckets will collect microplastics that are in the air, which will allow us to analyze the microplastics that were in the river and not those that came from the actual storm. To make sure our equipment did not get contaminated we left out two buckets, but only opened one to the atmosphere. We had planned on going to the lab of Dr. Miller, one of our professors, when we were done but we ran out of time. Having your schedule run over happens all the time doing fieldwork, so it is good to have a backup plan!



The atmospheric deposition buckets before removing one of the lids.


Written by Eva Kinney

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