It’s raining salamanders again! On Thursday, March 15, the first substantial rains arrived since March 1 and 2, when the spotted salamanders in Guion Woods made their yearly trek to the breeding pond.

A female spotted salamanderThis rain would allow the black-and-yellow critters to return to their burrows for another year of eating bugs and doing whatever it is salamanders do.

Suspecting this, biology professor Linda Fink went to Guion Pond expecting a mass exodus. What she found were salamanders leaving — and arriving — in large numbers. Between 10 and 11 p.m., she counted 78 males and 119 females, many of which were fat with eggs.

“It’s too rainy to see spermatophores,” Fink wrote in a late-night e-mail, “but this is a substantial breeding event. Salamanders are climbing up to the dam to get into the pond, and there were at least a dozen gathered below the dam.”

Fink later said many of creatures were not marked, indicating they had not been captured on the “big night.”

“A lot of these were unmarked that were leaving, which means we didn’t get the whole population,” she said. “I was suspecting that many who were leaving would have their toes clipped, but they didn’t.”

For more information, see this related story.

– By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer