[NatureList} Mudpuppy Night blog

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Everyone,

I've been quite sloppy in posting Mudpuppy Night results to the list
this winter (complications on who is gathering which data, and getting
it together), but here's a blog post by Kiley Briggs who was part of the
Vermont Mudpuppy crew years ago, and visited two weeks ago -
https://www.oriannesociety.org/faces-of-the-forest/mudpuppies-in-winter/

Hoping this doesn't make anyone over excited, I've also appended the
text of the article I've sent to the North Grenville Times about the
past week's crescendo of 'puppying.

With 10 cm of water in the snowpack, and the onset of above-freezing
temperatures, we don't know how long the Mudpuppy season will last, and
when we'll transition to frog calls and drifted shells.

fred.
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---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
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This Winter’s Mudpuppy Nights in Oxford Mills

Fred Schueler & Aleta Karstad, Fragile Inheritance Natural History

The success of last Friday’s Mudpuppy Night was made possible by the
MNR’s Eric Robertson arranging for the parking lot beside the dam to be
plowed of the half-metre of rutted snow that had been accumulating there
since December. The crowd included a class from Carleton University, two
students from Trent University, two local families, regular
creature-counters Payton McIntyre and Matt Keevil, and Carleton U.
master’s student Douglas Strick, who is putting microchips in the
‘puppies we catch so he’ll be able to track their movements down the
creek through the seasons. At one point 13 people were wading carefully
in the creek, and 11 were on the ice at the shore, all glittering with
headlamps and flashlights, with 6 Mudpuppies in buckets on the ice to be
admired and photographed before being taken up to Doug’s van to be
processed and then released. Friday’s regular event was preceded on
Thursday by a few visitors from South Nation Conservation and Akwesasne,
and we hosted an underwater photographer from Peterborough for Saturday
night.

Mudpuppies, Necturus maculosus, are foot-long permanently aquatic
salamanders, which have a substantial population in Kemptville Creek
below the dam in Oxford Mills. They are uniquely active in the winter,
and since 1999 Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills has made weekly surveys to
count the active ‘puppies that come up to the flat limestone creekbed
below the dam, also noting other creatures and the condition of the
water and ice.

This winter’s visits started in October, with almost no flow in the
drought-stricken creek, and gradually increasing (but below average)
flow until the rain and melt in mid-January. The subsequent cold snap
froze over much of the creek, and gradually reduced flows to the optimal
3-4 cubic metres/second. Counts have been lower than in previous
decades, generally less than a dozen, and the numerous frogs, tadpoles,
and crayfish seen earlier in the winter have all either been eaten by
the Mudpuppies or gone downstream.

Mudpuppy Nights are now fully booked until the anticipated end of the
season with the March freshet, but we will be reporting Mudpuppy
movements from tag-reading antennae.