Are Great Lakes mudpuppies victims of hurricane Sandy?

Dead Mudpuppies on the shore of Lake Huron

Hurricane Sandy may have had a huge impact on the New York metropolitan area, but it also whipped up 23-foot waves on Lake Huron that may have killed thousands of Mudpuppies.  These large (10-15 inch) aquatic salamanders are native to many lakes and river systems in the eastern half of the U.S., including Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes, where they reside in shallow water.  But the day after Sandy rolled through, the beaches of Lake Huron were covered in dead Mudpuppies.  Some think it was the physical agitation of the water that killed the salamanders, but others are unsure.

Read the full article

Spencer Hardy Reflects on a Memorable Summer

Spencer in the mountains of Quebec

When I enrolled in the Middlebury class of 2016 last spring, I didn't have much of a plan for the next 8 months. As a freshman slated to begin college in February 2013, I was suddenly presented with an opportunity to create experiences that I couldn't find in the classroom. One of the first places I went was VCE. I already knew the VCE biologists through our mutual interest in birding, and I had a desire to try my hand at serious fieldwork. As luck would have it, Kent McFarland and others needed help with data collection for some field projects.

When I enrolled in the Middlebury class of 2016 last spring, I didn’t have much of a plan for the next 8 months. As a freshman slated to begin college in February 2013, I was suddenly presented with an opportunity to create experiences that I couldn’t find in the classroom. One of the first places I went was VCE. I already knew the VCE biologists through our mutual interest in birding, and I had a desire to try my hand at serious fieldwork. As luck would have it, Kent McFarland and others needed help with data collection for some field projects.

Two days after finishing high school in mid-June, I was on my way to Quebec with Chris Rimmer. We joined two Canadian Wildlife Service colleagues to explore a region of the Laurentian Mountains where Bicknell’s Thrush were known to occur. That single week provided some of my most memorable experiences of the entire summer. Our first night found us camping on spectacular Mont Acropole, after a grueling hike with backpacks, thousands of feet above a precipitous river valley, and high enough above tree line to escape the black flies. Fox and White-throated Sparrows serenaded us at dusk.

Elsewhere, the bugs could not be evaded. I spent much of the next five days wrapped in a bug shirt as swarms of blackflies, mosquitoes, and deer flies did their best to find any patch of bare skin. Thankfully, biting insects were far from the only wildlife we encountered. Black bears, moose, and porcupines all made appearances, while birds were in abundance. We managed to net and band more than a dozen Bicknell’s Thrush, and collect information for the Quebec Breeding Bird atlas on species such as Barrow’s Goldeneye, Philadelphia Vireo, Tennessee Warbler, and Rusty Blackbird.

The endangered White Mountain
Fritillary navigates to Spencer

Returning to Vermont, fieldwork was nearly as exciting. I was assigned to three projects, each involving a different group of organisms. During the avian breeding season I spent several nights on Mt. Mansfield, putting in long hours of banding Bicknell’s Thrushes and other species with the VCE team as part of its long-term monitoring of high-elevation birds. The other two projects introduced me to biota I had never paid much attention to — insects. All summer I was collecting Bumblebees for the inaugural year of the Vermont Bee Atlas. This work took me all over southeastern Vermont and exposed me to new horizons, including the nuances of bumblebee identification and the chance to work independently. My third project may have been the most glamorous. Brendan Collins (a long-time VCE field biologist) and I were tasked with hiking the alpine zone of Mt. Washington. The subject of our quest wasn’t necessarily what one might expect to find in such a harsh environment — we were surveying for the White Mountain Fritillary, a small orange butterfly subspecies found only in a narrow zone of this one mountain (see photo). We collected basic natural history information such as habitat niche, flight period, and a rough estimation of its population.

Once the field season wrapped up, I continued to assist VCE with data entry for the projects I worked on this summer. However, no amount of data entry can return to VCE the benefits I have gained in the last 5 months. On top of the amazing field experience and training, the VCE staff has been incredibly supportive of my endeavors. Their numerous letters of recommendation helped not only with college applications, but most recently to secure my spot on an expedition to Patagonia as part of a conservation effort for the endangered Hooded Grebe. That’s another story, to be told when I return, before school beckons.

Spencer Hardy

Wingless Winter Moths

Male Operophtera sp. Photo K.P. McFarland

At dusk the temperature hovered around 40 degrees and was falling fast. I could see my breath, but all around me fluttered moths through the woods. Moths flying on a cold November night? I snapped a few photos of one and headed home to find out what this was all about.

My colleague Hugh McGuinness, a regional moth coordinator for the Butterflies and Moths of North America database (www.butterfliesandmoths.org), identified it as one of two species in the genus Operophtera, either the native bruceata (Bruce Spanworm) or the introduced brumata (Winter Moth), devilishly hard to identify by photograph alone.

Either way, both of these small cold weather moths are thermoconformers and can fly with air and body temperature ranging from about 27 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Flight is energetically costly, requiring warm, powerful muscles that can create enough wing strokes to sustain flight. How do these tiny moths fly in such cold conditions when muscles don’t operate quickly?

Morphology appears to be the key. The Bruce Spanworm male has one of the lowest wing-loadings (total weight divided by wing area) of any moth measured. This reduces the frequency of wing beats necessary to sustain flight and lowers the energetic cost. They also have one of the highest flight muscle ratios and these muscles are able to compensate for low contraction velocity in the cold with a high capacity to generate tension. Strong muscles, combined with few wing beats allow them to operate in very low temperatures as they seek the scent of female emitted pheromones.

The female is also well adapted to low temperatures. They are flightless. The Bruce Spanworm has no wings at all while the Winter Moth has just the vestiges of wings on its back. When they emerge in October or November, they crawl to the lower trunk of a host tree where they solicit flying males by wafting pheromones into the air.

Without bulky flight muscles weighing them down, Bruce Spanworm females fill their body from the edge of the thorax to the tip of the abdomen with eggs, 143 on average. That’s over 60% of their total body weight. A flight model by James Marden, a biologist at Penn State, suggests that if a female were to fly again with even weak flight at optimal temperatures, it would have a 17% reduction in the number of eggs it could carry. It would experience an 82% reduction in fecundity to fly powerfully.

Flying and crawling in the cold was probably a great adaptation to a powerful natural selection force, predation. By late October a large percentage of insectivorous birds have migrated south and bats have migrated or hibernated for the winter. With fewer predators comes great success.



Source: Marden, J.H. 1995. Evolutionary adaptation of contractile performance in muscle of ectothermic winter-flying moths. Journal of Experimental Biology 198, 2087-2094.

Long-Term Integrated Studies Show Complex and Surprising Effects of Climate Change in the Northern Hardwood Forest

Much biological research on climate change focuses on the impacts of warming and changes in precipitation over wide areas. Researchers are now increasingly recognizing that at the local scale they must understand the effects of climate change through the intertwined patterns of soils, vegetation, and water flowpaths—not forgetting the uses humans have made of the landscape. In the December issue of BioScience researchers describe how aboveground and belowground responses to springtime warming are becoming separated in time in a forest in New England. This and other indirect effects of climate change could alter the dominant trees and other plants in the region as well as the wildlife present, with likely consequences for local industry and tourism.

The observations could be a bellwether for changes in forests elsewhere. The researchers, led by Peter M. Groffman, analyzed findings from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, which has been studied for 50 years. Warming means spring has advanced and fall has retreated over that time. Together with increasing snow and rain, this has led to an increase in streamflow in winter and summer—but to a decline in the winter snowpack. The declining snowpack should favor deer at the expense of moose—which seems to be happening. And the earlier thaw means soils have been warming earlier in the springtime. Significantly, the interval between snowmelt and full leaf growth has increased—by 8 days over 50 years.

Soil nutrients can be more easily washed out during this transition period, and soil freezing can also occur. This can in turn threaten some tree species, including yellow birch and sugar maple—the main source of maple syrup. Soil invertebrates are also killed by soil freezing, so the species of birds that feed on them will likely change. Groffman and his colleagues stress that research into the likely effects of climate change should examine a full range of landscapes, including those affected by biological invaders. Research should also take advantage of the range of temperatures at different elevations to explore the effects of expected warming.

Read the full article (PDF)

The Night Life: Why We Need Bats All the Time--Not Just on Halloween

Researchers are identifying the important ecological and economic contributions of bats; gleaning lessons from incredible bat abilities that may advance technology; and helping to battle a new fatal bat epidemic.

See full article