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Stream Salamander Monitoring Project
Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont

Basic Protocol

  • Select 100 meter length of one or more study streams. Place artificial habitats (leaf bags) at 5 meter intervals along the length. Ours begin with “0” at the upstream end, and continue to 20, resulting in 21 bags per stream.

  • Each month, we visit the stream and record some basic water characteristics. We “evict” the salamanders from the habitats by filling a plastic tub with stream water, pouring it through the leaf bag while shaking the bag vigorously, pouring the resulting water and leaves through the colander to separate the solids, and picking through the leaves to make sure we got everything. We record the species, age class (adult or larva), total length, snout-to-vent length, and mass for the salamanders we find. We put the salamanders into plastic ziplock bags with a little water to identify and measure them to reduce the amount of handling they have to suffer.

  • Once a year, we count all salamanders that we can find in a 1 meter square quadrat next to each leaf bag. We turn over each rock in the quadrat and record the number of rocks and salamanders per quadrat. This activity generates data that can be compared to the leaf bag data.
Marbled Salamander

Northern Slimy Salamander

Both salamander were found under logs at the west end of Cades Cove, during Tremont's "Fall Naturalist's Weekend". Find out more about salamanders in the Park.

Photos by Charles Wilder.

 

Materials

For the artificial habitats, we have tried 2 materials. We used “bird block” netting, which is made of black nylon. It did not hold up as well as the alternative material, a plastic fencing. It is called Gardeneer Plastic Fencing and is made by Dalen Products, Inc. The Web address is <http;//www.gardeneer.com>, They don’t sell their products directly from their Web site, but they do list other Internet sites and retailers that carry their products. The company is located in Knoxville and actually donates the fencing to Tremont because we have that local connection. I’m sure you could use any similar type of netting or fencing material. The bags are roughly 10 inches by 10 inches and are closed on 3 sides by plastic wire ties. Each bag gets stuffed with leaves and a rock to help weight it down. We are experimenting with putting rocks around and on top of the bags as well. In fast-moving water, we tie the bags to rocks or branches so that they don’t wash away. We label our bags with basic flagging tape and a permanent marker.