Read Online The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by DavidGeorge Haskell - Free Book Online

female follows. She stops and uses her muscular vent to pick up the sperm. The dance breaks up and the salamanders wander on their separate ways, never to interact again.
    The female seeks out a rock crevice or hollow log in which to lay her eggs. She then wraps herself around them, remaining in the nest hole for six weeks, longer than most songbirds sit on their eggs. She rotates the eggs to stop the developing embryos from sticking to the sides. She also eats any egg that dies, preventing mold from growing and killing the whole clutch. Other salamanders may visit the nest hole, looking for an egg snack, and the brooding mother chases them off. Motherless broods invariably get infected by fungi or eaten by predators, so this vigil is crucial. Once the eggs hatch, her parental duties are finished, and the mother will renew her depleted energy reserves by feeding in the leaf litter. The young salamanders are miniature versions of the parent and strut across the forest floor, feeding themselves without assistance. The
Plethodon
scuttling across the mandala therefore lives its whole life without dipping a toe into a stream, puddle, or pond.
    This breeding process demolishes two myths. The first is that amphibians are dependent on water for breeding—
Plethodon
is a nonamphibious amphibian, as slippery to classify as it is to hold. The second myth is that amphibians are “primitive” and therefore don’t care for their young. This latter fallacy is embedded in theories about the evolution of the brain claiming that “higher” functions such as parental care are confined to “higher” animals such as mammals and birds. The mother’s careful vigil shows that parental solicitude is more widely spread in the animal kingdom than hierarchical brain scientists suppose. Indeed, many amphibians care for their eggs or their young, as do fish, reptiles, bees, beetles, and a menagerie of doting “primitive” parents.
    The juvenile salamander in the mandala will spend another year or two feeding in the leaf litter before it is large enough to become sexually mature.
Plethodon
sets to this task of feeding with carnivorous gusto. Salamanders are the sharks of the leaf litter, cruising the waters and devouring smaller invertebrate animals. Evolution has discarded
Plethodon
’s lungs to make its mouth a more effective snare. By eliminating the windpipe and breathing through its skin, the salamander frees its maw to wrestle prey without pause for breath.
Plethodon
has struck a deal with evolution’s Shylock: better tongues bought with a few grams of lung. The salamanders are living it up on their three-thousand-ducat loan, conquering the wet leaf litter across the eastern forest. The gamble is paying off at present, but the usurer may yet call in the debt. If pollution or global warming changes conditions in the leaf litter,
Plethodon
species will be ill suited to cope. Indeed, projections of habitat change caused by global warming suggest that mountain salamanders will suffer major declines as their cool, wet habitats disappear.
    No one knows how
Plethodon
salamanders arrived at their lungless condition. Their relatives all have lungs, although those that live in mountain streams have rather small lungs. Cold streams have plentiful oxygen, so stream-dwelling salamanders can use their skin as a breathingorgan. Perhaps the terrestrial lungless salamanders evolved from these stream-dwelling kin? This was biologists’ favorite explanation until researchers looked more closely into the geological record. The rocks told an inconvenient story: the eastern mountains were small undulations when
Plethodon
salamanders evolved. Such gentle inclines could not have produced the cold, rapid streams inhabited by the small-lunged salamanders. So, we are left without a historical narrative for the
Plethodon
’s lungless condition.
    The mandala is almost large enough to contain the whole world of this animal. Adults are territorial and rarely stray