Duck-walking for eggs as frosty salamanders vanish

Near Tallahassee, Nicole Dahrouge spends her days hunting frosted flatwoods salamander eggs in ephemeral ponds—work shaped by drought, predators, and climate shifts. As biologists warn the species is trapped in an extinction vortex, she and colleagues run a he

Near Tallahassee, Florida, Nicole Dahrouge is not a salamander. Still, crouched in a bog with her hands searching through short grass, she says it out loud for the second time in the last hour—like an affirmation, like a reminder of what the work is trying to mimic.

“I mean, I’m not a salamander.” She pauses, then adds, “But if I was, I would lay eggs right there.”

Her urgency is practical. Frosted flatwoods salamanders—“frosties,” as they’re lovingly called—are one of the most imperiled amphibians in North America. Biologists describe the situation they’re in as an “extinction vortex”: when a population becomes so small that its problems start compounding in ways that can become fatal.

Dahrouge’s job at the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC) is to keep frosties from tipping past that point. She walks through clingy brush to find their eggs. and she moves fast because the animals’ breeding depends on a narrow seasonal window. The eggs have to stay damp enough to develop, but not be inundated until water is actually there to stay. If a pond dries out early, the aquatic larvae that hatch can be stranded.

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 that should be inundated by winter’s rains. If the inundation doesn’t happen, the eggs dry up. And with shifting weather patterns as the world warms, Dahrouge’s gamble becomes harder year after year.

When the eggs are left in the wild, the survival rate is very low. Once they hatch into aquatic larvae, their odds don’t improve much. Drought can remove the water they need, and predators find them anyway.

“Everything eats them,” Dahrouge says. “They’re just like little protein gummy bears.”

So she tries to skew the odds at the earliest, most fragile stage—raising them in captivity long enough to get more of them through their first phases of life. It’s, as she puts it, a stop-gap with no end in sight.

Even ARC’s executive director, JJ Apodaca, frames the work with blunt stakes.

“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,” Apodaca says. “But we either do this now or we watch them go extinct.”

The fight is also shaped by what federal protection has—and hasn’t—caught up with.

In 1999, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) listed the flatwoods salamander as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. A decade later. officials realized that there were actually two species of “flatwoods salamanders” that look very similar—reticulated flatwoods salamanders and frosted flatwoods salamanders—and split them under federal law. The reticulateds were listed as endangered, while the frosties were listed as threatened.

Then, a status review published by the FWS in 2019 found that frosted flatwoods salamanders still warranted being listed as endangered because of “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,” an FWS spokesperson said in an email.

Advocates argue the species should be uplisted to match the reality on the ground. pointing to the fact that the Trump administration sought to limit certain protections for threatened species. Still, for Dahrouge and Apodaca, the daily work isn’t tethered to the paperwork. It’s tied to survival, habitat, and what can be done right now.

“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.”

That “saving” begins with habitat—because frosted flatwoods salamanders live in the longleaf pine forests of the Southeastern U.S., in flat, open stands of wildfire-dependent trees, grasses and shrubs that once covered the coastal plains from southern Virginia to east Texas.

Those landscapes didn’t hold. Large-scale logging, agriculture, subdivisions, and a century of fire suppression changed the forests’ structure. Today. just 3% or so of longleaf pine forest remains intact in the Southeast—scattered patches where frosties. reticulateds. and other imperiled longleaf-loving animals are left clinging.

Houston Chandler, science director for the nonprofit Orianne Society, puts it in stark terms.

“It’s a globally imperiled ecosystem sitting on top of a global biodiversity hotspot,” Chandler says. “Not a great combination.”

Chandler has been working in the largest remaining stand of old-growth longleaf pine forest on Eglin Air Force Base. There, his team has improved habitat for the reticulated flatwoods salamander by mechanically removing undergrowth and restoring wetlands. He calls the work brutal—often done in the heat of summer—and says it requires constant maintenance. But he also says it’s working: they have more sites occupied by reticulated flatwoods salamanders at the military installation than ever before.

Even so, the lesson isn’t that habitat fixes are fast.

Chandler notes that it took decades and decades of fire suppression, poor habitat management, and land conversion to push these animals into endangered status. “So it’s not going to be an overnight fix.”

Back at the egg-finding work, the fragility looks unmistakable.

In the bog, Dahrouge points to a cluster of frosted flatwoods salamander eggs she’s found. It’s a glistening glob of goo. She describes it the way she does when she’s training new people.

“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,” Dahrouge says.

The eggs are maybe a couple of weeks old, and the salamanders are still squiggling commas inside them. With a pocketknife and a tablespoon, she loosens up the patch of dirt and scoops it from the ground.

In severe drought years—the Southeast is experiencing drought—Dahrouge and her team pull every egg cluster they can find.

“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.” The word “salvage” captures the moment: take what you can before the water vanishes. To prevent the eggs from drying up. they’re stored in plastic containers packed with damp earth. then taken miles away to a more climate-controlled place.

That place, for Dahrouge, happens to be her backyard.

“This started as a woodworking shed that I built for my projects,” she says, walking through double doors into a garage-sized shack. She gestures toward unused saws, lumber, and recreational equipment pushed into a corner.

“Now we have salamanders.”

At this site, the eggs wait 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 moves the salamanders into cattle tanks lining her backyard. There are dozens of them. Each tank is its own miniature artificial wetland—called a mesocosm—built with vegetation and water collected from the field.

Food is part of the effort, too. At least once a week. Dahrouge or her colleague Matthew 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. She points to the risk in plain imagery: “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 can eat salamander eggs or aquatic larvae.

The end goal is straightforward: raise as many healthy larvae and salamanders as possible so they can be released back into wetlands where they were found. or to bolster other populations. In conservation circles, that approach is known as headstarting—raising an animal in captivity and releasing it in the wild.

Headstarting has a track record. It was used to pull the California condor back from the brink of extinction and is used for many imperiled species.

Carola Haas, an ecologist at Virginia Tech who has worked with reticulated flatwoods salamanders, describes why it can help and where it can mislead.

“It can be ‘hugely powerful to keep a cohort alive,’” Haas says. “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.”.

Haas argues that conservation shouldn’t center on headstarting while leaving habitat to fail.

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

The dilemma is bigger than one species.

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

With so little habitat and so few frosties left, Apodaca says habitat preservation and restoration alone won’t 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.

He argues the same problem shows up across many imperiled amphibians and reptiles. “We have to be. by necessity. entering into a new era of conservation that I think of as the age of implementation. ” Apodaca says. “There’s been decades of arguments of how active we should be in intervening [in nature] … to get over the next step. we’ve got to do a lot more direct species interaction.”.

In Dahrouge’s shed, direct species interaction looks like a kind of ritual.

At the back corner of her setup, she lifts a small, glistening female frosted flatwoods salamander from a bed of moss. It normally lives in a bog garden built in the backyard—an enclosure Dahrouge and Goetz built over months, with the hope of facilitating captive breeding.

The captive adults have all been named after stars, because the white flecks on their black stomachs resemble constellations in the night sky. Andromeda is one of her favorites.

“Because they’re my little stars,” Dahrouge says. She adds a quick correction: “Not that she has favorites, she quickly adds.”

Then she returns to the human reality behind the science.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world will never see this animal,” she says. “And I wish that everyone could because they’re just so infinitely worth knowing.”

Out in the bog, the work never pauses for wishes. In severe drought years, eggs are gathered as a salvage. In the shed, tanks wait like artificial wetlands. In the woods, longleaf pine forests get a chance—through mechanical removal, wetland restoration, and the kind of maintenance that doesn’t end.

The question hanging over every step is whether those efforts can outpace a warming world. collapsing habitat. and the compounding fragility of a species known to exist in only four areas. The answer. for now. depends on hands like Dahrouge’s—moving through short grass. trying to find where a salamander would lay eggs. and trying to keep those eggs from becoming one more loss.

frosted flatwoods salamander ARC headstarting amphibian conservation longleaf pine forests extinction vortex U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Act drought Eglin Air Force Base