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The small, terrestrial eastern red-backed salamander is abundant on many forest floors of northeastern North America. Dr. Robert Jaeger and many of his graduate students spent over 50 years studying this species in New York and Virginia, using ecological techniques in forests and behavioral experiments in laboratory chambers in an attempt to understand how this species interacts with other species in the forest and the components of its intra- and intersexual social behaviors. The competitive and social behaviors of this species are unusually complex for an amphibian. This species is highly aggressive towards other similar-size species where they cohabit in forests, often leading to very little geographic overlap between the species. The authors examine the fascinating behavioral traits of this species including social monogamy, mutual mate guarding, sexual coercion, inter-species communication, and conflict resolution.
The salamander family Plethodontidae is known for being an indicator of environmental health and has been labeled as the “canary in the coal mine” of forest ecosystems (Urban et al. 2014). One of the most widely distributed and commonly studied plethodontid species is the red-backed salamander (RBS, Plethodon cinereus). Populations of P. cinereus will be influenced by different variables within the environment including temperature, humidity, and leaf litter. Fundamental data on populations of P. cinereus must be gathered before we can understand how these intercorrelated variables will influence P. cinereus distribution and demographics. In this study I aimed to gather foundational data on the reproductive ecology of female red-backed salamanders in Stokes State Forest, Sussex County, New Jersey. Reproductive data were collected on 366 clutches from April 2017 to October 2019. I analyzed yearly and seasonal data as well as measured the effects of body size on clutch size. Results showed a positive correlation between body size and clutch size of P. cinereus. When seasons were analyzed separately, there were significant differences in clutch size among years for both the fall and the spring. Additionally, I manipulated leaf litter quantity and measured its impact on the clutch size of P. cinereus. I found that clutch size was positively associated with the quantity of leaf litter and decreased as leaf litter was removed from the study sites. This investigation provides a foundational analysis on the clutch size of P. cinereus in Stokes State Forest, providing significant information necessary for monitoring this population.
Patterns in the distributions of species result from numerous ecological and evolutionary processes, including competitive interactions, evolved physiological tolerances, and the historical environmental fluctuations that have caused ranges to shift, expand, or contract over long time periods. For some groups of species, these processes have resulted in an elaborate diversification of traits. For other groups, however, such as woodland salamanders (genus Plethodon), closely related species may be phenotypically similar or even identical. It is less clear what drives the formation of such species, whether and how they maintain their identities and interact after initial divergence, and how such similar species might have evolved ecologically in subtle ways to differentially utilize the landscape. The Eastern Red-backed Salamander (Plethodon cinereus) is a small, fully terrestrial woodland salamander notable for its wide distribution and high phylogeographic diversity in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. Most of its current distribution, however, was covered by ice sheets at the end of the Pleistocene, suggesting recent and rapid post-glacial expansion. It is not yet clear how P. cinereus colonized these landscapes, and what ecological characteristics made P. cinereus so successful in its range expansion compared to other species. Some studies comparing narrowly-distributed montane Plethodon to their lowland counterparts have suggested a combination of physiological specialization and competitive superiority of montane species relative to generalist lowland species such as P. cinereus, but it is unknown if this asymmetry applies to sets of lowland species outside of montane systems. In this dissertation, I explore the biogeography of woodland salamanders, with special attention to P. cinereus, at ecological and evolutionary time scales to uncover the processes that shape genetic diversity and species distributions. Chapters 1 and 2 concern the historical biogeography and evolution of P. cinereus, while Chapters 3 and 4 compare the habitat use of P. cinereus to two of its more broadly distributed relatives, the Northern Ravine Salamander (P. electromorphus) and the Southern Ravine Salamander (P. richmondi), to test if they have diverged ecologically, including multiple ecological scales. In Chapter 1, I used next-generation DNA sequencing to explore the phylogeographic structure and demographic history of P. cinereus, using the species as a model for the formation of incipient lineages of Plethodon. I identified several groups that diverged within the Pleistocene, yet I also found numerous and sometimes extensive regions of admixture between groups, suggesting a model of range fragmentation and fusion during incipient species formation. In Chapter 2, I focus on the most recent post-glacial expansion of P. cinereus, using DNA sequencing from range-wide samples to uncover the origins and routes of colonization. Results generally supported a southeastern coastal origin that expanded northward, westward into the Great Lakes region, and then a novel colonization route southward back into unglaciated areas. In Chapter 3, I used ecological niche modeling to test if niche differentiation between P. cinereus, P. electromorphus, and P. richmondi explains their broad distributional patterns. All species had estimated niches that were more different than expected by chance, and historical habitat suitability has fluctuated dramatically in the Holocene epoch, although I did not find strong evidence that climatic or topographic variables differentiated occurrences of P. cinereus and P. electromorphus within their overlapping distribution. Finally, in Chapter 4, I explore microhabitat differentiation between P. cinereus and P. electromorphus where they occur and interact at fine spatial scales. Plethodon cinereus greatly outnumbered P. electromorphus, and P. electromorphus used cooler, wetter microhabitats that were also occupied by P. cinereus, with no evidence for a negative correlation in their occupancies or abundances. Taken together, my work suggests that current distributions, including patterns within and between species, are shaped by historical range expansion and contractions, as well as subtle differences in habitat use at multiple spatial scales.
The red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus, is a common woodland amphibian that is found throughout much of eastern North America. The species is important to forest ecological processes, and changes in their population density are often used to measure the impacts of forest management, pollution, and environmental change. Therefore, consistent methods of density estimation are required. In the first chapter, I review spatial capture-recapture, a modern modeling tool that incorporates spatial information to reliably estimate population density without the need for the ad-hoc methods that render other density estimates incomparable. It can also be used to make inferences on space-use, population dynamics, and connectivity. I then demonstrate the versatility of spatial capture-recapture using P. cinereus mark-recapture data collected from my study sites in central Pennsylvania. For the second chapter of this thesis, I use spatial capture-recapture and other modeling approaches to test hypotheses about P. cinereus climate change adaptive capacity. This salamander is a convenient model for understanding dispersal-limited species, so I tested eight hypotheses to see how behavioral plasticity and fitness were affected by climate variability. Based on previous evidence, I also tested whether a common color polymorphism is a useful visual cue for predicting within-population variation in climate tolerances. Using four years of mark-recapture information from Maryland, I found the color morph is not a useful indicator, but overall, the population did show strong climate preferences, indicating that population persistence could be threatened by warmer and drier conditions predicted in the future.