Journal archives for January 2021

January 11, 2021

Jan 9 - South Side

40 dead newts, 4 juveniles, 0 live newts.
Jan 9, 2021 (Saturday) ~8:45-11:00 am
Weather: Dry and sunny in the mid 50s. No rain for many days.
Other roadkill: Flat skunk GONE!
Coverage: Aldercroft parking to first stop sign
Traffic: 16 cars, very few considering its the weekend.
Zero commercial trucks.
Pit traps: Empty.

Two conversations:

1) Female runner who adores the newts and had a million questions and wanted to know how to help. Asked to take photo of me (!) because of our snazzy vests, so thank you @merav for increasing the public visibility of our project. You might consider arming us with some sort of business cards with a link "for more information and how you can help" since this seems to happen regularly.

2) Friendly chat with the biologist from HTH at the south pit traps. He's a nice guy; went to Cal Poly SLO where he studied burrowing owls. In addition to working for HTH, he's working on his masters at SJSU with a project on red-legged frogs and CA tiger salamanders. He mentioned that the biggest newt massacres he's ever seen occurred when it was raining at night AND there was an accident on Highway 17, which detoured all the highway traffic onto Alma Bridge Road. I'm not sure where you'd find highway closure data, but it might be interesting to try and correlate those dates/times with the bigger mortality spikes we observed from previous years.

Posted on January 11, 2021 02:00 AM by anudibranchmom anudibranchmom | 1 comment | Leave a comment

January 13, 2021

Eastern Pacific Nudibranch News: Tritoniidae: 1) reinstated Tritonia exulsans and 2) New genus Tritonicula (affects 5 species)

Two recent taxon splits from a new paper from Tatiana Korshunova and Alexander Martynov (citation below). Action is only required on the first change.

Change #1: Tritonia exsulans has been reinstated - most recently it was included in Tritonia tetraquerta - and all iNat Observations WILL need to be re-reviewed since the ranges overlap. The super short, nonscientific answer on the visual difference/range is:

T. exsulans: Pink or salmon color, with white lines on the oral veil and between the dorsolateral appendages (range is California to British Columbia)
T. tetraquerta: Orange color, no white lines (range is Oregon to Kamchatka and Kuril Islands)

Change #2: Tritonicula: A new genus name for five species of Family Tritoniidae (Lamarck, 1809). I made the change to the new names in iNat this morning, and no manual changes are required (yay!). The new species names are:

Tritonicula bayeri (Ev. Marcus & Er. Marcus, 1967)
Tritonicula hamnerorum (Gosliner & Ghiselin, 1987)
Tritonicula myrakeenae (Bertsch & Osuna, 1986)
Tritonicula pickensi (Ev. Marcus & Er. Marcus, 1967)
Tritonicula wellsi (Er. Marcus, 1961)

Here's the full paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242103

Posted on January 13, 2021 06:22 PM by anudibranchmom anudibranchmom | 0 comments | Leave a comment

January 22, 2021

January 21, 2021 (Thursday): South Side

January 21, 2021 (Thursday): 7:45 am - 9:30 am
Coverage: Aldercroft Road to stop sign.
9 dead newts, none fresh. One was a juvenile.
Other roadkill: None
Pit Traps: Empty
Weather: Sunny, started at 48 degrees F, no precipitation (maybe tomorrow though)
Traffic: 12 vehicles, no pedestrians.
Garbage: Picked up a bag of lead fishing weights out of habit; I do the same thing along our coastline.

Posted on January 22, 2021 02:33 AM by anudibranchmom anudibranchmom | 0 comments | Leave a comment