Back to Cranberry

We had another of our visits to Cranberry Lake Preserve this week. We were learning about Vernal Pool ecology and hoping to locate some Salamander Egg Masses after The Night of the Salamanders. There are four Vernal pools so we hiked for about 10 minutes to the first one to check it out.

The Curator found some really cool stuff in the pool firstly a Salamander Hatchling which looks alot like a tadpole but has feathery gills rather than a smooth head/body. It was not created last week but back in Sept/October and was a marbled salamander rather than a spotted one which we were looking for. He also netted a tiny Spring Peeper - very small frog with a very lustrous singing voice, a larger frog and some interesting slimmy stuff.





This is what we were looking for! Fabulous, so the Salamader boys and gorls did manage to find each other on that rainy night and participated in some Salamander Business and here is the result. A nice big mass of Salamander eggs.



Then we went hunting for our own Pool Life, we did not find any eggs, but we did find some long skiiny worm thingys and some wriggly things and one of the boys in our group found a female American Bull Frog....yuck!