Inside the effort to save one of America's most imperiled salamanders

Frosted flatwoods salamanders, or "frosties" as they're lovingly called, are one of the most imperiled amphibians in the U.S. Nathan Rott/NPR hide caption

NEAR TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Nicole Dahrouge is not a salamander. Crouched in a bog, hands searching through short grass, she states it aloud for the second time in the last hour, almost like an affirmation.

"I mean, I'm not a salamander," she says. "But if I was, I would lay eggs right there."

There's always a bit of urgency collecting frosted flatwoods salamander eggs. The tiny and secretive ground-dwelling salamander is one of the most imperiled amphibians in North America, teetering on the brink of what biologists call an " extinction vortex " — the point at which a plant or animal's population is so small that its problems start to fatally compound.

Dahrouge's job at the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC) is to keep the "frosties," as they're lovingly called, from slipping over that precipice to the point of no return; to bolster their population and buy them time to adapt to the fast-changing world.

That starts with duck-walking through clingy brush to find their eggs.

"It's just like the world's itchiest scavenger hunt interspersed with little periodic injections of serotonin when you find something fun," she says, rubber boots squelching in damp earth.

Frosted flatwoods salamanders lay their eggs at the base of plants in ephemeral ponds. It's a delicate edge. The eggs need to remain damp enough to develop, but not be inundated until the water is there to stay. If the pond dries out prematurely, the aquatic larvae will be stranded. Nathan Rott/NPR hide caption

Frosted flatwoods salamander eggs require a very specific set of climatic conditions to hatch. They're laid, each fall, in ephemeral ponds; on dry mounds, like the one Dahrouge is circling, that should be inundated by winter's rains. It's an annual gamble for the salamanders. Without inundation, the eggs will dry up. And with weather patterns shifting, as the world warms , it's a wager they're less and less likely to win.

Dahrouge is trying to skew the odds. Left in the wild, the survival rate of eggs is very low. Once they hatch into aquatic larvae, their chances don't get much better. Drought aside, "everything eats them," she says. "They're just like little protein gummy bears."

So Dahrouge is trying to help get as many of them through their first phases of life as possible by raising them in captivity. It's a monumental effort. A "stop-gap," she says, with no end in sight. And it's an example of how difficult it is to recover a federally threatened or endangered species when they are already on the brink.

"Man, when we let species get to this point, it's so much effort and so much work and so much resources to get it to a point where it's back," says JJ Apodaca, ARC's executive director.

"But we either do this now or we watch them go extinct."

Few places left to live

Most of what scientists know about frosted flatwoods salamanders comes from what they're able to glean during egg-laying season. As a part of the mole salamander family, they spend most of their lives in burrows underground.

Fittingly, their color ranges from deep black to dark chocolate, their backs covered in crisscrossed and mottled white-gray lines. "Think like a dewy sparkly spiderweb laid over a black background," Dahrouge says. "They're beautiful."

In 1999, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the flatwoods salamander as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. A decade later, realizing that there were actually two species of "flatwoods salamanders" that looked very similar — the reticulated flatwoods salamander and the frosted flatwoods salamander — they were split up under federal law. The reticulateds were listed as endangered, the frosties as threatened.

A status review of the frosted flatwoods salamander, published by the FWS in 2019, found that they too warranted being listed as endangered due to "declining population trends." Seven years later, the FWS still hasn't taken any action.

"Even though it hasn't officially been reclassified yet, it still gets nearly all the same protections as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act," a spokesperson for the FWS said in an email.

Advocates for the salamander say it should be uplisted to reflect the reality, noting that the Trump administration has sought to limit certain protections for threatened species .

On the ground, ecologists like Dahrouge and Apodaca are more focused on stabilizing populations and improving habitat than the salamanders' federal status.

"Policy can't go out and save a species," Apodaca says. "We, as a community, we as a society have to go out and save that species."

For both flatwoods salamanders, that means improving habitat. They live in the longleaf pine forests of the Southeastern U.S. — flat, open stands of wildfire-dependent trees, grasses and shrubs that used to cover the coastal plains from southern Virginia to east Texas.

Then came large-scale logging. Agriculture. Subdivisions. A century of fire suppression.

Longleaf pine forests are one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world. They're adapted to regular low-intensity wildfires that clear out underbrush. Nathan Rott/NPR hide caption

Today, just 3% or so of longleaf pine forest remains intact in the Southeast — made up of scattered patches that the frosties, reticulateds and other imperiled longleaf-loving animals are left clinging to.

"It's a globally imperiled ecosystem sitting on top of a global biodiversity hotspot," says Houston Chandler, science director for the nonprofit Orianne Society, which focuses on amphibian and reptile conservation. "Not a great combination."

Chandler has been working in the largest remaining stand of old-growth longleaf pine forest, on Eglin Air Force Base, to improve habitat for the reticulated flatwoods salamander by mechanically removing undergrowth and restoring wetlands.

It's brutal labor, Chandler says, often done in the heat of summer. And it requires constant maintenance. But, he says, it's also working. They have more sites occupied by reticulated flatwoods salamanders at the military installation than ever before.

"It took decades and decades of fire suppression and poor habitat management and land conversion for them to become endangered in the first place," Chandler says. "So it's not going to be an overnight fix."

Raising "beefy" salamanders

Boots squelching, Dahrouge shifts to point at a cluster of frosted flatwoods salamander eggs she's found. It's a glistening glob of goo.

"My perhaps not entirely appropriate description when I'm training new people is it looks like someone hocked a loogie into the base of this plant," she says.

The eggs are maybe a couple of weeks old. The salamanders are still squiggling commas inside them. With a pocketknife and tablespoon, she loosens up the patch of dirt they sit on and scoops it from the ground. In severe drought years, like the kind the Southeast is experiencing now , they'll pull every egg cluster they can find — "a salvage," as they call it. To prevent the eggs from drying up, they're stored in plastic containers packed with damp earth and taken, miles away, to a place that's more climate-controlled.

Nicole Dahrouge spritzes a cluster of eggs that's been removed from a wetland to keep them damp. Nathan Rott/NPR hide caption

That place just happens to be sitting in her backyard.

"This started as a woodworking shed that I built for my projects," Dahrouge says, walking through double doors into a garage-sized shack. She gestures toward a pile of unused saws, lumber and recreational equipment that's been pushed into a corner. "Now we have salamanders."

The eggs are stored until they're ready to be inundated with water and primed to hatch. Dahrouge checks on them constantly. "I'm a helicopter parent, 100 percent," she says.

The next phase requires moving them to a series of cattle tanks that line her backyard. There are dozens of them. Each is its own miniature artificial wetland — a mesocosm — built with vegetation and water that Dahrouge and her colleague, Matthew Goetz, collect from the field.

They also collect food. At least once a week, Dahrouge or Goetz goes to nearby wetlands, stirs shin-deep water and collects silty samples filled with arthropods, daphnia and other macroscopic critters the salamanders will eat. Hours more are spent picking out pinprick-size predators from the water with pipettes.

"It's very time-intensive but very necessary," Dahrouge says. "I don't know if you've ever seen a dragonfly larva, but they look like the creature from Alien and can unhinge their jaw and eat a salamander larva that's the same size as they are, so we want to save them from that fate."

A single macroscopic predator that goes undetected in the water they've collected from wetlands can eat salamander eggs or aquatic larvae. Nathan Rott/NPR hide caption

The end goal is to raise as many healthy larvae and salamanders as they can, so they can be released back into the wetlands they were found in or to bolster others. In conservation circles, the technique is known as headstarting — raise an animal in captivity, release it in the wild.

The practice was used to pull the California condor back from the brink of extinction and is used for many imperiled species. It can be "hugely powerful to keep a cohort alive," says Carola Haas, an ecologist at Virginia Tech who's worked with reticulated flatwoods salamanders.

"But any time you rear something in a tank, you're selecting for captivity. And the characteristics that make you good at surviving in a tank may be the exact opposite of the characteristics that make you good at surviving in the wild," she says.

Instead, she argues, the conservation community should focus its efforts on restoring the salamanders' habitat.

"If the habitat restoration doesn't happen, nothing can persist," she says. "And that's expensive and time-consuming enough in itself."

Currently, frosted flatwoods salamanders are only known to exist in four areas. Some populations are isolated, making them vulnerable to inbreeding. All are at risk of stand-alone weather events like hurricanes, disease or drought.

With so little habitat and so few frosties left, Apodaca says, they've crossed the point where habitat preservation and restoration, alone, will not be enough to keep them from going extinct.

"In my opinion, there's zero chance this species makes it out and naturally recovers itself if we just fix the habitat," he says.