Written by: Andre Chan, MF ‘26
Surveys in the Duke Forest
All year long, coverboards lie flat on the Duke Forest floor at research sites called transects. To the untrained eye, they are nothing worth noting—simple wooden and tin sheets laid in a straight line over several hundred feet. But to a trained volunteer, these boards are the lids of treasure chests. What lies beneath each one is a surprise, but fingers are crossed for herpetofauna.
The word herpetofauna comes from the Greek root herpeton,meaning “creeping animals”; it refers to amphibians like frogs and salamanders, and to reptiles like snakes and lizards. People in the scientific community refer to them by the shorthand “herps”, which I adopt to fit in.
Leaves crunched underfoot as I walked in the Duke Forest on a cool March morning with Erin Hecht, the Senior Program Coordinator for the Duke Forest. We were conducting a herpetofauna survey for the Duke Forest Practicum course within the Nicholas School of the Environment. As part of the survey, we were flipping the coverboards and recording our findings.
The first coverboard that we flipped was empty. The second—empty. The third—empty again. I was starting to think that the Greeks would be disappointed about the lack of herpetons when we lifted the fourth board. “Salamander!” someone cried. It was a juvenile marbled salamander about two inches long. Its tiny arms cycled back and forth on the soil as it propelled itself toward its haven of leaf litter, trying to escape our gaze. Too late. We quickly took a photo of it and documented the sighting on our clipboard: one marbled salamander found.
While our survey was part of a class, the data we collected were aggregated with the findings from the entire herp community science program. The program, which runs from late February through October, enlists public volunteers to help collect data on what they spot under the coverboards. Applications open in January, and volunteers undergo training before they conduct surveys.
The program has been in place since 2018, and has documented thousands of observations. In 2025 alone, volunteers found over 25 different species of herpetofauna and made 649 observations. Having all this data available will help the Duke Forest staff plan forest management activities that help herps thrive. Wildlife biologists also use the data to learn about herp behavior as their habitat changes due to urban expansion and climate change.
“The starting point for conservation work is to know the creatures that are present and what kinds of challenges they may be facing. That’s why the survey work is so important,” said Dr. Ron Grunwald, a biologist at Duke who has been working with salamanders for decades.
Woodland salamanders – The red-backed salamander
The most common salamanders found during herp surveys are the woodland species. These include the red-backed and white-spotted slimy salamanders, which are exclusively terrestrial and are typically found upland. Red-backed salamanders are typically only found under the coverboards during mating season, given that they live underground for most of their lives: “We only find them when they emerge aboveground in November for their mating parties,” Dr. Grunwald quipped, “then they are gone back underground by April.
Red-backed salamanders are even more common in northern states. The Duke Forest lies on the southern edge of their range. Further north in the US, quantitative surveys have shown that red-backed salamanders have the largest biomass of all forest vertebrates, similar to or even greater than that of the much larger white-tailed deer.
Wetland salamanders – The marbled salamander
Although most salamanders observed in the Duke Forest are woodland salamanders, wetland salamanders are commonly recorded too. That’s because some coverboards are set up in floodplains.
Examples of wetland salamanders include the marbled salamander that my class found during our survey, but also other species like the white-spotted slimy salamander. Adult wetland salamanders are terrestrial and live underground like woodland salamanders. However, they have a unique trait: they are born as aquatic beings.
The birth of a wetland salamander is the result of a fascinating gamble. In October, the mothers lay a clutch of fifty to seventy eggs on a dry basin which they expect to become a pond after the December rains. The reason for this is known to all mothers—they want to give their children the best chance of success in life.
When the eggs hatch in the new pond as tiny larvae, they are free-living carnivorous predators that are at the top of the food chain in the absence of fish. Until the pond dries up in late spring, the larvae devour as much food as they can until it becomes time for them to metamorphose into ground-dwelling adults. The bigger they are when the metamorphosis occurs, the more successful they are. “The game is to begin eating the first day the restaurant opens,” Dr. Grunwald explained.
This gamble becomes risky when the rain is decreased or delayed. “This year was terrible for marbled salamanders because of the drought,” Dr. Grunwald grumbled, “Ponds that were normally filled by January were dry or very shallow.” In February, when the rain came, some females got lucky and their eggs hatched, but the larvae were tiny, the size they would usually be three months earlier.
To make matters worse, January was unusually cold and the shallow ponds that the eggs were in froze all the way to the bottom. Unfortunately, some eggs froze and died.
Climate modeling from a research study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management predicts that weather changes will impact the future availability of ephemeral ponds in the Eastern United States. This will impact the survival rate of wetland salamanders in the region.
Fortunately, marbled salamanders are resilient—to a point. “To the best of our understanding, they reproduce every year, and they live for ten to twenty years, so they are not dependent on a perfect year every year,” Dr. Grunwald said, “but if there are consistently bad years, then their survival becomes risky.”
Conclusion – Herpetofauna surveys
The diversity of salamanders and their behavior surprised me, and I found out that I have a lot to learn about the herpetofauna in the Duke Forest. In fact, there are more salamanders than are able to be counted. According to Dr. Grunwald, “there are several species of stream salamanders like the two-lined, three-lined, dusky, and mud salamanders that generally don’t show up in coverboard surveys because we don’t place coverboards in the water”.
Applications for the 2027 survey season will begin in early January 2027. Till then, the boards will continue to lie across the Duke Forest, concealing their treasure. Beneath them, salamanders can be found, their curling tails and flexible bodies marked with pale marbling, golden-yellow spots, or red or lead lines. And every so often, when one is revealed, the silence of the forest will be broken by the excited cry of a volunteer: “Salamander!” Join the survey program, and you could be the volunteer who finds the next one.
Works Cited
- Personal communication with Dr. Ron Grunwald. Apr 2026.
- Duke Forest. Herpetofauna of the Duke Forest. Accessed Apr 2026. https://dukeforest.duke.edu/volunteer/community-science/herpetofauna/
- USGS. 2024. Study finds salamanders are surprisingly abundant in northeastern forests. https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/study-finds-salamanders-are-surprisingly-abundant-northeastern-forests
- Widmer, B. W., T. M.Gehring, B. W.Heumann, and K. E.Nicholson. 2022. “Climate change and range restriction of common salamanders in eastern Canada and the United States.” Journal of Wildlife Management 86. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.22235