Marbled in algae

I hadn't ever intended to post two images at once, but this was a special case. I was trying to search through drifts of some sort of angel-hair-like algae that had bloomed in a stream I was studying, and at one point, I spotted a dark shape that didn't seem like a twig or a leaf stem. I had my net and collecting tray—the latter a holdover from my darkroom days—so I scooped up the shadow and waited for everything to calm down. Sure enough, it was a salamander larva, this one, a Marbled Salamander, a rather uncommon species with a kind of clairvoyance. The adults court and the females lay their eggs in dry holes that will eventually fill with water and become vernal pools. How they can tell the future is anybody's guess, but a pair of Marbleds guessed right last fall, and this is one of their success stories. All winter, it dined on small aquatic invertebrates—anything it could swallow—and gleaned oxygen out of the frigid water with those bushy gills that look rather like mini-Christmas trees growing out of the sides of the salamander's head. Add one more member to the cast of characters at Babcock Ridge.

Marbled at Babcock