Mouse Eaters and Salamander Larvae

I've whipped out the mouse a handful of times already this year. Most days it was a mediocre producer. It just wasn't moving many fish. They hadn't been in the river long enough to be very hungry and the water was cold. I needed just one before the snow melted, and fortunately I got it, so I could take this photo:

Time: middle of the day. Foreground: trout with big mouse in his maw. Background: snow. Not as cool as my big snowstorm brookie on a mouse in 2017, but mice, trout, snow, and daylight generally don't mix in most fly anglers' minds.

Then came yesterday. The fish were on. I had to work the pocket water, the fish that haven't already been caught were the ones really willing to move up, but my numbers weren't bad. Six on the mouse. A slow, steady pick. My hookup ratio was phenomenal, actually. I only missed two fish. Normally I'd have to flip that ratio.

A very uniquely intact dorsal on a stocker bow.

It was supposed to rain at some point during the day here. It didn't. I fished in quite dry conditions hoping to see some drops. Why? I was anticipating some amphibian movement after dark. Noah and I went out late to look for spotted salamanders and it hadn't even showered yet. With the ground still dry, we went to search the edges of vernal pools. We found salamanders, but not spotteds.

Noah and I found, among the giant cased caddis, crayfish, fairy shrimp, and assorted water bugs, larval marbled salamanders. This was my first time getting to see a larval mole salamander up close and it was awesome.

Marbled salamanders have a unique life history compared to many amphibians. Their reproductive methods are surprising. Unlike their more famous cousin, the spotted salamander, and most of the rest of North American amphibians, Ambystoma opacum drop their eggs under rotting logs, bark, or leaf litter in the dry bottoms of vernal pools in the fall. After the pools fill back up and the water slowly begins to warm, their larvae emerge. Right now, as the pools are loosing their last bits of ice in central CT, larvae marbled salamanders are swimming around in the leaf litter. They look more like fish than they do a mole salamanders, dodging giant water beetles and crayfish, munching on small fairy shrimp, swimming around in water that other amphibian species haven't even really started to lay their own eggs in yet. What a remarkable species!

Eventually it did begin to rain, so we left the trails and took to the streets, driving slowly and stopping when we saw something of an amphibious nature. Well, we ended up stopping a lot. Very cold, stiff, slow spring peepers and wood frogs were all over the place. Salamanders though, were curiously absent. Maybe it was just a little to cold. Or maybe, had we stayed out longer, they would have made an appearance. Who knows?

Pseudacris crucifer

Lithobates sylvaticus

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